Sara Ryan

So we spent most of tonight at the emergency animal hospital, because Snag discovered that he is not the unbeatable warrior he thinks he is. Abscess, sutures, antibiotics, drain, Elizabethan collar. Or “e-collar” for short, aka the Cone of Shame. He’s gonna have to wear it for a week to ten days. He is exactly [...]

Hey, readers! I know that a significant subset of you are affiliated with libraries in various capacities, and I think that is excellent. On October 9th, I’ll be speaking at the Washington Library Media Association conference in Yakima, Washington. My talk is called “Balancing Act: Being an Author/Librarian And How You Can, Too!” (Yes, it [...]

Invitations are nearly always flattering. (Unless they’re the sort of “Dear Author” spam that implies the sender lacks the faintest clue about who you are, and/or they come from exuberant social networkers who invite their entire friendslist to every event in their lives.) An invitation suggests that the sender values you and/or your work, and [...]

On our way to sell/donate books at the majestic Powell’s warehouse in the northwest industrial district, we saw this: Any Portlanders familiar with this tiger? My Flytrap characters would’ve scaled the fence and done circus stunts on it.

Lately I’ve been engaged in several distinct organizational projects: some domestic, some day-job-focused. Closets. Books. Entire rooms. I find something fundamentally satisfying about organizing, whether it’s arranging dresses and jackets by color, sorting our stock of comics for the next convention, or weeding and shifting the book collection to accommodate yet more graphic novels. A [...]

Listening: Cadillac Orpheus, by Solon Timothy Woodward. It’s Woodward’s first novel, set in small-town Florida, a brilliant combination of over-the-top events and characters and cool, precisely descriptive prose. Read by the equally amazing Dion Graham. Upstate, by Kalisha Buckhanon. An epistolary novel. The letters are between Natasha and Antonio, young lovers from Harlem separated when [...]

Again, the main conversation’s over at Chasing Ray. The question, this time: “What sort of subjects do teen girls need to address in their reading that they can not simply find in adult titles? In other words – why do we need YA titles for girls in particular?” I was struggling with my response in [...]

I lucked into spending some time in an amazing backyard over the weekend.

It’s embarrassing to confess how relieved I was when my Significant Object suddenly got a small flurry of bids and sold for $15.50, more than seven times its original purchase price of $2.00. I’ve never held the popsicle-stick construction; I’ve never even been in the same state with it. But because of the story, that [...]