Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Blogging Break

After a long blogging break, I'm finally back to writing.  Why the absence?  I'm not sure, but it may have something to do with my thinking that posts need to be perfect, and so I put it off, and off, and off... However, I have recently been reminded that “It is not necessary to commit to perfection, but to progress." (A Higher Standard of Leadership:  Lessons from the Life of Gandhi by Kashavan Nair p. 103).  So here I am, sharing my learning again. 


I've decided to try a new format for my blog.  Hopefully, this will help me stay on track.  It will be short and simple, and updates will be more manageable for me.  

What I learned today:  Thanks to Donalyn Miller, I learned a new vocabulary word, epistolary.  She recently tweeted, " Deadly by Julie Chibbaro. Epistolary novel about the 1906 NY typhoid epidemic and the search for Typhoid Mary."  I had no idea what this was so, of course, I Googled it.  I discovered that an epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of documents.  This immediately brought to mind a couple of examples in my own collection, Griffin and Sabine by Nick Bantock and The Jolly Postman: Or Other People's Letters by Janet and allen Ahlberg. Griffin and Sabine is a love story written as a series of hand painted postcards and letters.   The Jolly Postman invites readers into a wondrous world with a variety of correspondence between classic fairy tale characters.   Honestly, I had forgotten about this genre, so I am looking forward to getting my hands on a copy of Deadly.   Are there any other epistolary novels I should add to my TBR pile?

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