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April 20, 2016Kid Lit Can, with Susan Hughes: the Magic, the Wonder - Chatting with Ya Fantasy Authors (Part 1)
In my capacity as freelance story coach and manuscript critiquer, I receive many inquiries and, interestingly, I’ve realized that a disproportionately high number of them are from writers working on ...
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May 20, 2009
More About Knowing Where We’re Coming from
Funny. In the last post, talking about the need to preserve our cultural creations, I said that we have to know where we’re coming from or we won’t know where we’re going. Today, by accident, I ...
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May 19, 2009Sugar Belly and the Canefields
Sugar Belly pulled all kinds of sounds out of his bamboo sax. Hear the sax wail!
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May 19, 2009Sugar Belly, the Bamboo Saxophone, and Slide Mongoose
Sugar Belly, the Jamaican mento musician who invented the bamboo saxophone, explains how he made it, and plays a Jamaican folk tune, "Slide Mongoose"
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March 09, 2016Kid Lit Can, with Susan Hughes: Sex, and Drugs, and Rock and Roll: Writing Edgy Ya (Part 2)
They’ve written about it all: drugs, gambling, sexual harassment, suicide, sexual abuse, physical abuse, cutting, death, sex, drugs, body image issues, bullying, STDs, abduction...Today I continue my ...
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May 19, 2009
Sugar Belly's Bamboo Sax
We were teenagers, older teens.On Saturday morning, we’d go down to Victoria Pier, named after the Queen whose Day we celebrate as I type, so that I just found myself ducking fireworks that seemed dangerously ...
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May 11, 2009
Duppy Business?
“Man proposes, God disposes.”The disposition in this case concerns the rear window on the driver’s side of our Civic.We’d said goodbye to our daughter, her husband and our granddaughter five minutes ...
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October 14, 2015Kid Lit Can, with Susan Hughes: Q and A with 2015 Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction Nominees, Part II
Welcome! Today I continue my chat with the three terrific authors whose five books have been nominated for the CCBC Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction for Young People: Patrick Bowman, Marsha ...
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May 07, 2009
Cool Stuff
Yesterday’s NEW YORK TIMES carried an article in their “Dining” section about Shave Ice, which Florence Fabricant, the author, describes as “popular in Hawaii and Japan as well as other parts ...
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May 04, 2009
It’s About Time
I once told my next door neighbour that I was eighty-seven.It was meant to be a joke.“No…” said she, unbelieving. “You couldn’t be…”“No,” said I. “I’m really not!” And we both ...