The End

I recently published my first edited book,  Labor of Love: A Literary Mama Staff Anthology ,  with  Small Harbor Publishing . It's an anthology of writing from  Literary Mama  staff over the past 20 years. It's a beautiful collection and I am proud of the writers and proud to share the book.  It seems a fitting moment, as I pondered sharing about the book here on the blog, to reflect on my life as a blogger, and acknowledge that it is time to officially end this blog.   I started blogging in about 2007, when my baby was learning to toddle, when I was learning how to be a mother and stepmother, when I was just starting to see my way as a writer. I needed it back then. I craved it. I had a variety of blog iterations--family, art, creativity, writing things I delved into. There's a freedom in blogging, a casualness, an easy familiarity that's lacking (for me anyway) in other kinds of writing. I loved blogging and the words came pouring out.  Over the years since then, some

The Salamander Room

A blending of natural history and fiction is what you'll find when you open the pages of Anne Mazer's The Salamander Room. Beautifully illustrated by Steve Johnson this book draws the reader in from the first page.

It is the story of a young boy who wants to brings a small orange salamander home with him, to live in his room. This of course, is not the ideal habitat for a salamander, and so the boy is questioned by a voice, presumably of a parent, how he will care for the amphibian.

The questions asked seem to make the boy, and us, think about the world from the salamander's perspective. Where will he sleep, and play, and what will he eat? So bit by bit the boy starts to bring in, quite imaginatively, all the parts and pieces of the ecosystem that make up a salamander's forest home. The illustrations slowly turn the bedroom into a forest and by the end of the book, the boy and the salamander are sleeping together in a colorful nature scene.

This book doesn't contain facts or figures, but it quite effectively makes the reader think about all the intertwined parts of the natural world. We realize that you cannot take once piece of the puzzle out of it's environment without bringing a lot of other pieces with you. Through this boy's joyful willingness to turn his room into a forest we can see and feel our interconnectedness, which is, of course, my kind of story.

Comments

Roberta Gibson said…
OOh, we loved this book. We even made some changes to my son's room so it was more like a "salamander room" in honor of the book.
Roberta said…
That last comment was from Roberta at Wrapped in Foil/Growing with Science. I have no idea how Blogger found that old account.
Sue Heavenrich said…
I love Salamander Room - and wanted to turn my study into such a room. But impractical. Still....