Q & Eh?

Ask me anything

I’m about to do something I haven’t done in almost six years.

“Eat a salad?” you ask.

Rude, but fair.

And also, no, not hardly.

I’m about to go read one of my books to a kindergarten class!

I used to do school visits and read to kids all the time, but when COVID hit, the kids were no longer allowed at the schools. Individual home visits were prohibitive on a number of levels, so my school visit days came to an abrupt halt.

I really started writing children’s books for my boys, and I had years and years of amazing author days, but my boys were already starting to age out of my readership when the world shut down in 2020. By the time we reopened, they were done with my middle school Sycamore Detective Agency series, but not quite ready for this column.

So, the school visits never started up again – that is until this Friday, when my five-foot-tall stuffed sidekick and I get to go read My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh to our good friends’ daughter’s class. I am definitely going to have to shake off the dust and rust in the next couple days, because kindergarten classes are the literary wild west.

One of the things that always made school visits so enjoyable for me were the questions the kids would ask about being an author. Sure, when I talked to the older grades, I would occasionally get some silly, trivial questions like, “How do you develop good quality characters?”, and “Can you describe your process for outlining a story?”

Those questions were adorable, so I did my best to answer them with a kind smile on my face, but let’s be serious – that’s hardly what young aspiring authors need to know. Thankfully, the kindergarteners always get right to the meat of the issues.

“Does anyone have any questions for me about being an author?”

“How old are you?”

“Can you read us another book?”

“You’re bald.”

“Could a jackal eat a person? How about a cardboard person? An alien? A ghost?”

“How tall are you?”

“Why are there so many words?”

“Do you know my dad?”

“How did you make the words?”

[pointing to the class library shelves] “Did you write all those books?”

“You have lots of fillings in your teeth.”

“My grandma has those same shoes, but in black.”

“How do you make the words different colors?”

“How do the pages stay in the book?”

“My dad’s name is Mark.”

These are the hard-hitting literary issues that need to be addressed. These are the crucial questions that every budding author should be asking.

My personal favorite was in a smaller kindergarten class, probably very similar to the one I’m going to visit on Friday. An adorable little girl in the front row sat pensively for a few seconds after I called on her, then the burning question she had been waiting to ask an author all her life popped into her head.

“Where do you get dressed?”

My first thought was that she might be roasting me, and she was going to come right back with, “In the dark?”

I would have respected the heck out of that.

She didn’t though. She just gazed up at me, smiling, proud of her insightful literary question.

“In my room,” I responded.

Her eyes went wide. “Wow! Me too!” she gasped.

Well, there you go, sweetheart. You’re practically an author already.

Wish me luck, folks. I’m going to need it!

See you soon,

-Smidge

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