Last night I did a spooky event at my neighborhood library, the Sulzer Regional Library in Lincoln Square in Chicago. The premise was “Northside Nightmares,” and I was joined by Chicago ghosts-and-grisly lore expert Adam Selzer and Bram Stoker award-winning horror novelist Cynthia Pelayo for readings and talks and fun! Thanks to Kyle Watson of the Sulzer Library for setting this all up.

And thanks to the Chicago Public Library’s very capable publicity for getting the word out. We had a pretty good crowd!

I went first, and did readings from Bride of the Tornado and a tornado trivia contest, and of course I wore my tornado costume while singing the plot of the book to the tune of “Rock You Like A Hurricane”:

We had spooky treats, thanks to Heather’s last-minute baking! Check out these ghost brownies:

After I did my shtick, Adam Selzer regaled us with true scary stories about the north side of Chicago—the haunted tattoo parlor on Irving Park Avenue! the 19th-century murderer Adolph Luetgert who disposed of his wife’s corpse in a vat in his sausage factory! a reputed northside Chicago body dumping-ground of the infamous H.H. Holmes! the St. Valentine’s Day massacre!—and more. Adam is famous for the ghost tours he leads all around Chicago. Learn more about him and what he does at Mysterious Chicago.

Cynthia Pelayo followed up with readings from her books, such as her newest Forgotten Sisters, which is set right around the corner in Ravenswood Gardens!

We got to hang out with friends old and new, and take pictures with the strangely creepy art that’s all around the Sulzer. I really hope they never change it, it’s so bizarre and idiosyncratic . . .

Thanks to everyone who came and made this event such a success!

It helps to have interesting friends! My high school pal Kathleen is married to a tall ship captain, Jamie. (In both senses: he is the captain of a tall ship, and also literally tall.) He helms the Manitou, a replica of an 1800s schooner sailing out of Traverse City, Michigan. A week ago Heather and I took Lucy and Ingrid for an overnight sail on the Manitou, and I highly recommend it! (You can book your own trip here.)

It was a twenty-four hour trip, sailing out on Friday afternoon and coming back Saturday afternoon. We particularly enjoyed how passengers were invited to participate in some of the physical work on board such as hauling ropes to raise the sails—it makes you feel like you’re part of the crew! In the galley, the chef Lexi made delicious breakfast, lunches, dinner, and snacks, and I was surprised at the elaborate meals she managed to create in such a small space. The cabins were similarly cozy:

It was fun and relaxing to hang out with Jamie and Kathleen and the crew, as well as all the other passengers. There’s plenty of time to chat, and the vibe was very chill. Relaxing under the stars at night was a treat. (Living in the city, I don’t often get to see so many stars and the Milky Way . . . plus four shooting stars!) Captain Jamie gave some talks that helped us understand the history of the boat and the history of the area. We sailed to Power Island, and hiking around there was a great way to break up the trip. Here’s Jamie and Lucy on the island:

Kathleen and I have known each other since we were freshmen in high school. We even went to the Homecoming dance together! Here we are, then and now:

As I wrap this post, I recall that the very first post of this blog mentions Kathleen and Jamie—when they came to Chicago on his then-current ship, The Pride of Baltimore II, and Heather and I took our niece and nephew Freya and Theo onto it. As I read that old post, I’m struck at how much has changed since I started this blog in 2008. Freya and Theo are both adults now. Back then, I was in my band Brilliant Pebbles, and most of the post is about that—being in that band had been such a huge part of my life back then! That was before Lucy was born, and before Ingrid was born, and none of my books had come out yet, and I hadn’t yet even conceived of the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival. And of course so much more.

So much has changed in the first sixteen years of this blog. I wonder what will change in the next sixteen years?

It’s the first LIVE show of the Secrets of Story podcast! We recorded it at the Book Stall bookstore in Winnetka, IL, with a live audience mostly of folks from the North Shore SCBWI (Society of Children’s Books Writers and Illustators). Thanks to Robert Macdonald and the staff of the Book Stall for hosting us, to Andrew Atienza for the ace recording and production, to Anny Rusk and everyone in SCBWI for putting the event together, and to Ruth Spiro for the picture above!

In this episode, Matt Bird and I join his wife Betsy Bird, who is a famous children’s librarian with the influential kidlit blog A Fuse #8 Production and an author of children’s books in her own right, most recently of A Long Road to the Circus. I met Matt through Betsy, actually—she contacted me after she noticed this goofball Newbery Medal-related rant I wrote on my blog back in the day, and soon after she interviewed me on Fuse #8. After that, our friendship was off to the races!

Here Matt, Betsy, and I discuss different techniques of how to represent the experience of childhood in writing. Matt argues that novels that feature truly authentic kids are by definition not children’s books, which is just the first of the many hot takes in this episode. Folks, it’s a banger, and you can hear it here:

Wait, did I say there were hot takes? Yes! You’ll hear claims that “Beverly Cleary isn’t really on Ramona’s side,” that Diary of a Wimpy Kid is a deceptively sophisticated and multivalent text, and how kids nowadays don’t seem to vibe as much with the classic “unlikeable” characters in books like Harriet the Spy and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. We’ll bring in examples of representations of childhood from sources as varied as Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Louis Sachar’s Sideways Stories from Wayside School, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Auberon Waugh’s autobiography Will This Do?, Annie Barrows’ Ivy and Bean books, Daniel Handler’s recent memoir And Then? And Then? What Else? (which I recently reviewed for the Wall Street Journal), and more. We talk about kids’ flexible sense of truth and reality, their generously cartoonish sense of the possible, their attraction to weirdness and arbitrariness, their comfort and perhaps even preference for a whiplash switching of tones, and so much more!

This is an all-time great episode with a guest who really knows her stuff (and knows how to keep Matt and me from fighting). Give it a listen!