Lois Lowry

I know I have said this aloud and in print before, but I love Charlottesville, Virginia. Love it! There is no place I'd rather live that right here at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Today after church I fed the boys a quick lunch of left over pizza from Friday's pizza/movie night and drove the 15 minutes into town passing a whopping 4 traffic lights to sit and listen to Lois Lowry at the Culbreth Theater on the campus of UVA. We had general admission tickets and arrived early enough to get 2nd row seats, which I knew would be key if the boys were going to have to sit still for yet another hour after the three hours of church they'd already sat through. We brought along four books of Mrs. Lowry's that everyone except Jonah has read: The Giver, Gathering Blue, The Messenger and Son. Earlier in the month Gavin read The Giver for the first time as part of his reading group at school and was so captivated by the story that in the next two weeks finished the other three books. So when the chance came up to see her in person, how could we resist. Jared was traveling at the time, but we kept him up with texts and a phone call afterwards knowing he would have loved to be there with us.

This event was part of the Virginia Festival of the Book which is a yearly celebration to promote reading and literacy as well as honoring the culture of the book. Kathryn Erskine (a reasonably well-known author from Virginia) and Lois Lowry both came out on stage for this afternoons session and sat in two soft chairs. Kathryn would be the interviewer of Lois for the next hour. As the questions began, Mrs. Lowry surprised me with her very casual body language, especially for someone who is 77 years old. She crossed her legs in a way more common for men and with her two hands behind her head talked about how she comes up with names of her characters: "with very few exceptions, the names just come to me when I see the charter in my mind" to her personal writing style and habits: she's not very routine other than usually having the beginning and the end of a story worked out before the coming up with the middle pieces that will tie them together. She said she loves to form words, then sentences, then paragraphs, then stories and that she knew from the time she was about 9 years old that she wanted to be a writer. She talked about the movie of The Giver that will be coming out this summer with a cast that includes Jeff Bridges as the Giver and Meryl Streep as the Chief Elder. I didn't even know the movie was coming out let alone casting one of my favorite actors, Jeff Bridges.

After getting our books signed, the boys thanked me for taking them and I'm grateful that they were able to put a face to the author of stories we all love. And if I were a betting woman, I'd put my money on Liam publishing something of his own one day and I wouldn't mind being in the audience listening to him when I'm 77 years old!

There was this amazing formation of saplings out front that people were observing and the boys were fascinated with for several minutes before Caleb make the poor choice of tagging someone.  It was wet and muddy and it was a work of art after all! So in the 5 seconds from the first tag Gavin and Jonah had fallen and slid and that was how we ended our lovely outing! Honestly!