The Best Day of the Year

The Scholastic Book Fair

Hi friends,

One of the best parts about creating a community from scratch is it can look any way we want it to look. We all wanted to write together, and so we do, all year round, but more specifically during #1000wordsofsummer, which is our big group project.

But also somewhere along the way it became clear that plenty of us wanted to do a little good outside of this online community, and this showed up in part in the form of donations each summer. So I realized I needed to put some thought into it. I had lots of conversations about it with friends and advisors and I looked at the world around me for ideas. I just knew we could make something special happen.

I am so happy to share some gorgeous pictures from our second year sponsoring a Scholastic Book fair for an entire school—Schaumburg Elementary in New Orleans East. More than six hundred and fifty children each got a book. I feel so lucky I got to watch these kids run into the school library so excited to pick out a book they could take home and keep “forever and ever,” as a few of them said.

A big thank you to all the great kids I met who were so sweet and fun to hang out with and to all the hardworking teachers bringing them to the fair. An extra big thank you to school librarian Maureen Iverson, who I met many moons ago when she was still a bookseller and I was just a down-on-my-luck Brooklyn writer crashing in New Orleans for a few months. (Once again, something nice happened in a bookstore.) She is basically a superhero, committed, patient, and she makes a lot of magic happen—and damn she does a hell of a book display.

Thank you again to all of you who donated, and of course to our beloved contributing writers this year: Jericho Brown, Catherine Lacey, Kaveh Akbar, Imani Perry, Justin Taylor, Jennine Capó Crucet, Emily Raboteau, Charlie Jane Anders, Priyanka Mattoo, Bobby Finger, Jane Marie, Rachel Khong and Cristina Henriquez. Thank you for showing up and doing the work year-round.

Look, we are all just fumbling into what feels good and correct in life, just as we do with our writing. I genuinely believe we’re fumbling our way in the right direction.

Sending love and gratitude,

Jami

You are reading Craft Talk, the home of #1000wordsofsummer and also a weekly newsletter about writing from Jami Attenberg. I’m also on twitter and instagram.