So if you saw that lovely rectangle of light on Thursday and if we all looked like we were having a great time, we were. Our emcee, Mary Gordon Spence, was a hoot! I really admire an emcee who comes in with great material but who is also ready to go where the night leads her. Our founder Melanie Moore brought her cute little dachshund, Ethel (once Badgerdog’s mascot badgerdog), and Mary Gordon found a way to work Ethel into the program. In other words, there was a little something for everyone.

Maybe you were there so you already know that you were a part of something magical. Whether you were there or not, here are a couple of brief stories I wanted to share with you.

Our amazing gala chair, Judith Cayton, had a good friend in attendance who had just gotten married the week before. This new wife asked our poet-on-demand Jena Kirkpatrick for a poem to give to her new husband. How lovely and romantic! Wouldn’t it be great if the City of Austin just hired Jena to record all the important doings of our community in verse? Plus, I like the idea of something created on the spot that evening living on in someone’s home and marking two important occasions—something public and something private.

And here’s the thing I heard that made me want to cry. Maybe you remember our Facebook post last week with the bio from our student reader: “Bijou is an abnormal aspiring writer who spends 24/7 tormenting the lives of those who oppose feminism. She also spends a lot of time reading science fiction novels and writing. When she grows up, she hopes to live in the mountains, where she’ll have all the time in the world to write what comes to mind.” After that, you can imagine why we were so excited to hear her, right?

Well, she brought the house down. Her writing is far more sophisticated than you’d expect for her age—and she writes with a lovely, fierce emotion. She is the real deal—as her teacher in attendance will tell you. Well at the end of the night, our featured reader Bret Anthony Johnston gave her his email. Folks, he runs the creative writing program at Harvard … so I’m thinking this might mean great things for the stellarly talented Bijou.

Plus this story shows that we’re doing what we mean to do—connecting established writers with emerging ones, introducing great new voices to audiences. I couldn’t have asked for a better moment. Everyone on staff is so grateful for the many people who came together and made the evening a smashing success. Here’s to next year!

P.S. Stay tuned for pictures from the big day….

As Badgerdog’s Poet Laureate, Amy wins a $250 prize donated by Forrest Preece and Linda Ball, and she’s invited to read at our upcoming Community Wide Reading this Saturday, May 12.  Though we may not be able to afford a city-wide parade to honor Amy, we hope that she and her classmates and teachers have a parade in their hearts and minds (and maybe even a miniparade in the hallway) to celebrate.

“An Egg’s Real Life” was inspired by a sculpture Amy saw, Omen by the Nigerian artist El Anatsui, during her Badgerdog field trip to the Blanton Museum.

El Anatsui, Omen, 1978

An Egg’s Real Life

A tree once had a child.
The egg still remains in the park,
and never hatches.
People have said they have seen it move,
going downtown
to go to its mother for one night.
Then it goes back to its home to live by
itself.
They say Omen, the egg,
will never hatch.
It’s still a baby
that grows fast.
When it sleeps on the grass,
the mother hugs it from the ground,
and nobody knows what will happen next.

Amy, fourth grade, Pioneer Crossing Elementary School

Congratulations to Amy and her Badgerdog Instructor Elizabeth Wyckoff and Amy’s teacher Ms. Rich.  We are so proud of all of our Badgerdog writers, and we can’t wait until they see the fruits of their hard work and creativity: their work published in print!

Mark your calendars!

Saturday, May 12, from 10 a.m. to noon
at St. David’s Episcopal Church
301 East 8th Street

As in years’ past, some forty student writers from Austin, Manor, and Del Valle schools will take the stage at St. David’s Episcopal Church in downtown Austin. They’ll share the poems and stories they authored this year while working with the Badgerdog writers who visited their classrooms each week.

You’ll hear fourth grader Heather from Perez Elementary School read her poem “The Three Funs”:

I think I am a police officer with a wing behind her back.

Or Rahslyn from Baty Elementary School reading her story, “Mr. Dark,” about an imaginary friend who is lighter than air and whose legs sway behind him slowly like a shadow.

And then there’s Jesse, who will read from his poem, “Oh, I Hate This Pillow”:

I am getting to the part where you sound like a guy who broke all his bones, and you make me sick and you touch my hair whenever you feel like it.

Brooke from Ojeda Middle School will share her prose poem, “Kerosene-Covered Strawberries,” which begins:

I once had an idea. It lay out in spirals across my hands and yours and the skies and the trees and the mountains in between.

Immediately after the reading, Badgerdog will host a reception for our student authors—nearly 250 young writers. They’ll receive—and see for the very first time—copies of the new publications they helped create together. Then they’ll take their seats to sign autographs for adoring fans.

As we write this, the student anthologies—Rise and Emerge—are traveling cross-country from the printer to Austin. The books are not only beautiful on the inside, but equally gorgeous on the outside. For each new publication, Badgerdog selects artwork created by students in the same age group as the writers who authored the poems and stories contained between the book jackets.

This year, we are honored to feature the work of two incredible young artists. Lilly’s piece, “Sea Blue,” will grace the cover our elementary school anthology, Rise. Lilly is a fourth grader at the Girls’ School of Austin. And Caroline’s piece, “In the Headlights,” will appear on the cover of our middle and high school anthology, Emerge. Caroline is an eighth grader at the Girls’ School of Austin.

Selecting our cover art winners was no easy task. We received so many jaw-dropping pieces, we were biting our nails just trying to choose one. But there is some small relief in featuring their artwork here.  For Rise, our finalists are:

“Koi Pond” by Paloma, a third grader at the Girls’ School of Austin

“Kangaroo Rat” by Drue, a fourth grader at the Girls’ School of Austin

And “Starry Night” by Amy, a fifth grader at Hornsby-Dunlap Elementary School

For Emerge, our finalists are:

“Love Stinks” by Alexis, a seventh grader at the Girls’ School of Austin

“Pink Slip Blues” by Abby, an eighth grader at the Girls’ School of Austin

And “Warmth” by Dung, a twelfth grader at the Griffin School

As you can see, there is much to celebrate next Saturday—the amazing feats of our young writers and their beautiful, hilarious, and triumphant words; the young artists whose work will compliment the words printed on the pages of the anthologies; our teaching artists, who inspire young writers every day; and the schools and teachers we work with, educators who’ve graciously shared their classrooms with us this year.

We hope you can join us! We promise a memorable event—you’re guaranteed to laugh, and there’s a good chance you’ll shed a few tears of joy.

In case you’re still on the fence, we’ll also have cookies and lemonade!

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately for many reasons. Here’s a couple: 1) The Light / The Holocaust & Humanity project seemed all about making history luminescent even in its difficulties and showing how the human voice speaking in art is a kind of illumination, a glow. 2) Also, there have been some amazing readings in April (Gaby Calvocoressi, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Jess Stoner, Justin Sirois, Peter Orner, Walter Kirn, Heidi Julavits, Ben Marcus, Raj Parameswaran) and that much strange brilliance in a month will recalibrate you to the world.

Mainly though, I’ve been thinking about illumination as a tribute. This year, we’re giving the second annual Forrest Preece Literary Light Award to Donna and Philip Berber. If you don’t know them already, they started A Glimmer of Hope Foundation, which does just what its name promises. They give people across the world—in Africa and underserved neighborhoods in London and Austin—the tools they need to live better lives and to go forward with hope. Sometimes those tools are schools or water sanitation facilities or health clinics. In Badgerdog’s case, we partnered with the Foundation to help students and seniors in South and East Austin realize the power of their own voices. Because of the Berbers, Badgerdog has been able to give hundreds of Central Texas kids and seniors the chance to hone their literary skills. That may sound abstract but what it means is this: our participants have been empowered to share their stories, their minds, and their hearts.

Not only is this one of the strongest experiences a person can have—to say what they want in a way that reaches fully out to another human—but it’s vital for all of us as a community that we each have a voice to tell our tale. We practice empathy and make discoveries by learning through others’ stories. Along the way, we become more full—not with ourselves, but with the world—and in doing so, we become the kind of people who can leave something great behind.

So, I’ll admit that basically everyone in the Badgerdog office thinks of the Berbers as heroes. (Frankly, I can’t tell you how many people have gushed about them since we chose them as this year’s award winners last fall.) We wanted to do well by them at our annual gala, and one of the things we wanted to do was show how their inspiration passes on that glimmer of hope, that light to others.

So we reached out to some of our favorite writers and people we admired in the world and asked them: What inspires you? Each participant in the journal project inscribed the first page or first few pages of a blank journal with their signature and something that inspired them. Here are some of our generous and star-studded participants so far: Andrea Barrett, Charles Baxter, Elizabeth Crook, Owen Egerton, Greg Garrett, Gilbert Tuhabonye of Gilbert’s Gazelles, Natalie Goldberg, Amelia Gray, the Homesick Texan Lisa Fain, Intergalactic Nemesis, W.C. Jameson, Rosemary Lehmberg, Nakia, Joyce Carol Oates, Turk Pipkin, Mary Gordon Spence, Laurie Wagner Buyer, and Dean Young.

Some have sent back quotes, others have added pictures or told stories. Sara Hickman’s journal is a collage of revelations and stickers and photos. Some writers like Austin Kleon and George Saunders added illustrations. Everyone has made it the journal project their own. It’s exciting to think about someone going home with each of these. I picture that person charged with inspiration, using the remaining blank pages to be in dialogue with one of their heroes.

Here’s the catch: you only get to see the journals (and maybe own one—or more than one…) if you come to the event celebrating the Berbers and Badgerdog next Thursday, May 3, 6:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. at the Kodosky Donor Lounge. The silent auction will be open from 6:30 p.m. to 7:40 p.m., so plan on arriving early to browse. My bet is that the people taking these journals home will find something beautiful in the world next week. I hope you’re one of them! I’d like to know you have something great ahead of you. (Info and tickets: here.)

On Saturday, April 21, the Austin Public Library Friends Foundation hosted the third annual New Fiction Confab, a writing conference created to expose Austin readers and writers to the most innovative, up-to-date trends in fiction.

Badgerdog partnered with the foundation to host Ben Marcus’ packed workshop/craft talk for older writers.  As many of our Silver Voices in Ink listened and laughed with the widely praised author and editor, they also left pondering important questions: Are we aware of what we, as writers, are asking our readers to do—commit their limited time and energy to our words? How much can we leave out, how much do we not have to say to keep our readers’ imaginations actively engaged? Marcus answered questions about the difficulty of putting oral family histories onto paper and told the audience about how he manages writing with small children and limited space: “Writing doesn’t happen unless you’re desperate for it too.” As folks filed out and headed to the main branch for the next round of talks, Serena, one of our Silver Voices in Ink, stopped Jess Stoner, our Education Programs coordinator: “That was awesome,” she said.  ”But he is too humble!”

At the next round of events at the John Henry Faulk Library, a crowd of fifty gathered for the afternoon to listen to readings from novelists Walter Kirn, Peter Orner, Ben Marcus, and Heidi Julavits and engage in question-and-answer sessions with each author. The Q&As drew out remarkable stuff. Ben Marcus mentioned his decades-long obsession with language-as-toxic-or-at-least-mildly-sickening force. Peter Orner expressed hope for a post-Mugabe Zimbabwe. Heidi Julavits told the audience that she found the inspiration for The Vanishers, her novel of women’s rivalries and psychic attacks, in midwifery texts and a striking feminist performance art piece by Yoko Ono. The day culminated in a panel on the state of publishing, where the writers were joined by American Short Fiction editor Jill Meyers. The panel pondered publishing’s move from paper to digital and suggested this would extend the length of novels and other works (given the lack of limiting physical factors such as a spine that would break, for example); took positions on the Pulitzer Board not giving an award in fiction this year (ultimately positive for all three books, because people are talking about them); and began to cast the movie version of the Internet novel that is Wikipedia (Ryan Gosling, have your people call our people).

Badgerdog and American Short Fiction were excited to help facilitate the events and even more pleased to help bring these talented writers into conversation with Austin’s engaged thinkers.

On Thursday, April 19, Badgerdog attended the Yam HaShoah/Holocaust Remembrance Day Commemoration at Congregation Agudas Achim, which also acted as the closing ceremony to Ballet Austin’s three-month community dialogue: Light / The Holocaust & Humanity project.

Chorus Austin began the service with the same hauntingly beautiful songs they performed at Badgerdog’s In Front of Strangers I Sing event at Ballet Austin: “The Journey Home” and “We Remember Them.”

As Holocaust survivors and children of survivors lit candles in remembrance of those who perished, members of the Austin City Council, Austin Police Department, Anti-Defamation League, and Ballet Austin read aloud the “Statement of Commitment,” which promises to remember those who have been lost, to recognize that “humanity is still scarred by the belief that our differences make some people’s lives worth less than others’,” and pledges that the lessons from these tragic, terrible events are fully learned.

Stephen Mills, Ballet Austin’s choreographer and artistic director, delivered the keynote address. He spoke of the inspiration for “Light,” the search for a deeper meaning within himself, and his goal of using dance to convene community. He also shared the letter he wrote to Naomi Warren, the Holocaust survivor whose story is told in “Light.” In the letter, he spoke of hope as a shield: against degradation, against violence, against indifference.

A butterfly from The Butterfly Project, currently showing at the Umlauf Sculpture Garden.

We left the event bereft and humbled, determined and hopeful. We cannot change what happened in the Holocaust. But we can change the world. Mills reminded us of Elie Wiesel’s words, “The opposite of hate is not love, it is indifference.” Badgerdog is committed to staying awake and to helping the writers we work with do the same.  Since In Front of Strangers I Sing, we have lead writing workshops with Kealing Middle School students who visited the Holocaust Museum in Houston. We introduced Kealing’s sixth graders to Miklos Radnoti‘s poems and helped them think through and write about their experiences at the museum, to process what empathy means and how we can use words to honor those who are gone and stay connected and awake in the present. Our instructors continue to expose their students to the works of those who suffered, and still suffer today, the terrible consequence of being different.

The Stay Awake Campaign, an outgrowth of the Light project, reminds us that we can stay awake, that we can combat indifference in so many ways. You can watch KLRU’s documentary about the ballet and talk about it with your family and friends. You can read our Badgerdog writers’ words from In Front of Strangers I Sing, and start a dialogue with your children or co-workers.

He was the last. Truly the last.
Such yellowness was bitter and blinding
Like the sun’s tear shattered on stone.
That was his true colour.
And how easily he climbed, and how high,
Certainly, climbing, he wanted
To kiss the last of my world.

I have been here seven weeks,
“Ghettoized”
Who loved me have found me,
Daisies call to me,
And the branches also of the white chestnut in the yard.
But I haven’t seen a butterfly here.
That last one was the last one.
There are no butterflies, here, in the ghetto.

Pavel Friedman, a young poet who lived in the Theresienstadt Ghetto, wrote these words.  He was deported to Auschwitz and died on September 29, 1944.  We encourage you to keep Friedman’s words with you as you make the conscious decision to stay awake against bigotry and hate, as you fight one of the world’s greatest enemies: indifference.

The theme of Celebrating Voices in Ink came out of our ongoing work. Across our programs, something magical happens in the transformation of an idea from something amorphous or spoken into something concrete. For some of our writers, the idea first takes form in the marks of a ballpoint pen—while for some the ink hits the page inside a laser printer—but for all of our writers, we bring their ink into a community of Ink in the pages of our national journal and our local senior and student anthologies.

We knew the heart of our program would pull some of the best voices from those pages. If you came to Light / The Holocaust & Humanity reading, you may have already been dazzled by middle schooler Bijou. Or you might have heard Silver Voices in Ink reader Dorothy bring the house down at her site reading. There are few joys as pure as hearing someone read something truly great—and knowing you have been a part of championing that emerging voice. Our gala guests support our year-long programs, and we want them to feel that pride, too—so we’ve asked these two authors for an encore. If you read Monday’s blog post, you already know we’re over the moon about the award-winning featured reader Bret Anthony Johnston. To top the program off, we asked our favorite local speaker Mary Gordon Spence to be our emcee. Since she’s a writer herself, she’s been keen on the project and promises to make the whole evening funny and inspiring. It turned out that planning the program was easy—we just needed to keep searching for the way to make the whole event something magical. We added the voices of Chorus Austin, Rabbi Neil Blumofe, and jazz singer Liz Morphis to the evening to further celebrate our honorees Donna and Philip Berber, and we kept thinking.

It made sense to look to our instructors, who come to us already as talented writers and experienced teachers—but who also go on to win national and international awards for their work. We’ve been really lucky to have the passionate, kind Jena Kirkpatrick as one of our writers in the schools these last few years. You may have seen Jena writing poems on demand in a local farmer’s market—and for the event, she will be setting up her typewriter and giving gala guests something unique and memorable to take home.

Speaking of things to take home, our board has done an amazing job of reaching out to the community to get great silent auction items (follow our Twitter account to get sneak peaks!). We also wanted something for the auction that involved our guests in our story. We came back to the idea of discovery and inspiration—and decided we wanted to ask some national and local celebs to inscribe journals for us with something that inspires them. The journal project itself has been inspiring as people across the country—Joyce Carol Oates, Bob Schneider, George Saunders, Turk Pipkin, Gilbert Tuhabonye, Dean Young, and many others—have joined our happy cause. As the personalized journals have been arriving, it’s been great to feel how many people out there care about keeping literary communities alive.

There won’t be physical fire inside the gala—no sparklers or candles or fireworks—but we challenge our guests to leave without feeling a deep inner warmth. In fact I bet people will leave with two competing impulses: 1) to open a bottle of champagne on a city roof and read some poems loudly to the sky and 2) to go home and curl up with a good book, underlining the best parts so they can start a conversation about it. Or at least, that’s what I hope happens. I’d love for you to come and tell me how it is. Tickets, sponsorships, and more info here: www.badgerdog.org/gala2012. More on the honorees and our silent auction next week.

At the moment, our office smells like a gigantic new book, which is to say—it smells amazing! Every bookshelf and available surface has been colonized by stacks and stacks of ten incredible novels and story collections, all of them headed to greener pastures as part of World Book Night (WBN)—a nationwide initiative (book give-away) taking place in 6,000 cities and towns across the U.S. beginning April 23.

The goal is to place literature in the hands of light readers or non-readers and allow them the joy and discovery of opening a book and immersing oneself in a story. Or, as Scott Lubeck, president of the WBN Central Texas Chapter, eloquently put it at a reception for WBN this past Sunday: “We hope to illustrate the power of books to change people’s lives. There are so many people not exposed to books, and I believe we can change lives with these powerful social artifacts.”

Author Sarah Bird also attended the reception and read from one of her favorite books, The Hunger Games. Growing up in a military family, Bird said reading The Wizard of Oz and later The Hunger Games, spoke to her in profound ways because both were about young girls whose worlds had been turned upside down. “It hurts me to think there might be young people out there who don’t know the great comfort books can provide,” Bird said of the WBN effort to deliver 500,000 across the country.

This is WBN’s inaugural year in the U.S. (it began last year in the U.K.). Austin proudly ranks first among participating cities, prepared to give away more books per capita than any other metropolitan area. When it’s all said and done, 62 Austin givers, including Badgerdog, will have passed along 8,000 books to readers in the community.

Last week, we collected our stash of books from BookPeople, and we’ll be looking for teachers, libraries, community service organizations, hospitals, and nursing homes that could use a literary donation to enrich the lives of those they work with. If you know a teacher or organization who would like to receive books, please contact Cecily Sailer: cecily (dot) sailer (at) badgerdog (dot) org, or (512) 538-1305 x102 to place your order.

We have the following titles available for pick up:
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian, Sherman Alexie
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
Little Bee, Chris Cleave
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
Zeitoun, Dave Eggers
The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
The Things They Carried, Tim O’ Brien
Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot

A few guidelines:

• Book recipients must be 16 years old or older, or accompanied by an adult.
• Specially printed World Book Night editions are not for resale.
• Books should go to those who do not read books regularly.

We must thank the Society of Children’s Books Writers and Illustrators for bringing us into the project, which enables us to give away nearly 1,000 copies of the books listed above. Thank you to World Book Night for their vision and activism. And thank you to BookPeople for helping us get these books to folks who can read and and fall in love with them. Read more about World Book Night in Publisher’s Weekly. You can follow World Book Night USA on Facebook and Twitter.

On one hand, publishing great literature should be its own reward. But let’s face it, we all care far more about building community and creating dialogue than we do about just pronouncing something good. So sure, a prize is a great thing in-and-of-itself—no one turns away a blue ribbon, unless you’re Axl Rose—but more than the decoration or the bragging rights, an award means that the pieces from the journal are speaking to people out in the world.

If you haven’t read Bret’s story yet, I won’t give anything away. I’ll just say that it dwells on a trip that a recently widowed father takes with his son to a clown competition—and that it’s amazing. In it, Bret does that quicksilver thing that great writers do where he blurs what’s funny with what’s sad until you feel the world coalesce into a strange, wondrous discovery that holds still and shining for just a minute—just long enough for you to see through to the luminous heart of it. For its craft alone, the story roundly deserves the recognition.

It’s also great to see Bret win this because he is one of the kindest writers I know. I’ve seen him advocate passionately for the place of independent publishing and the teaching of writing and all the things that keep literature alive in a country on the ground floor. Not that artists need to be good people to be talented writers, but it always makes me happy when both of those impulses to greatness coexist.

This is great timing for us, too, because Bret is flying in early next month from Boston, where he runs the Harvard Creative Writing Program, to be our featured reader at Badgerdog’s annual gala (May 3, 6:30 p.m. to 9 p.m., Kodosky Donor Lounge in the Long Center). If past is prologue, he’ll be charming and insightful and wildly entertaining. I can’t wait to toast his award and hear him read. Hopefully, you can come too. Tickets and info here: www.badgerdog.org/gala2012.

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