Tagged The Checkerbook

Of Festivals & Kelly Barnhill

Yesterday I read from both Goblin Secrets and Ghoulish Song as at a festival of children’s authors and illustrators. The reading was fun, the festival was marvelous, and the Anderson Center has a tower in it. 

Next month I’ll be reading at the Twin Cities Book Festival, which will have a Children’s Pavilion in it.

Kelly Barnhill, author of The Mostly True Story of Jack and the forthcoming-very-soon Iron Hearted Violet, read from both books at the very same festival. She’s as good with words spoken as she is with words in ink–which is very good–and after her reading I asked my favorite question.

Her very first bedtime stories came from the Checkerbook. It was actually a well-loved and badly worn copy of fairy tales that her father rebound with a checkerboard, but she didn’t find that out until later. For years it was the Checkerbook, and the stories inside it were Checkerbook stories.

What a grand and dangerous thing to do. I wonder what sort of games the tales played inside that book.