Virginia Euwer Wolff
The Mozart Season
Fresh Lookology features books published several years ago that are too good to languish on the shelf.
At the end of softball season and the beginning of summer, 12-year-old Allegra Leah Shapiro learns that she has been selected as a finalist in the Ernest Bloch Young Musicians’ Competition. She is the youngest finalist, something she worries about as she spends the summer practicing Mozart’s fourth violin concerto.… more
Virginia Euwer Wolff: The Guys’ Clubhouse
I didn’t even ask why I was turning into Holden Caulfield. I was fifteen, a brochure girl for postwar innocence. And I was a farm kid, three thousand miles away from Holden’s Manhattan; I took violin lessons, rode my bike through orchards, memorized social studies facts, picked strawberries to make money, earned Camp Fire Girl honor beads. I also sought the right bras, the right pimple medicine, the boys most likely to alarm my family.… more
Behind the Poem, “What She Asked”
Listen to Virginia’s poem, “What She Asked,” on Poetry Mosaic, the April 7th entry, and then read her description of the real-life event behind the poem.
In a rural Oregon high school where I taught English more than 20 years ago, we had big teaching areas separated by screen-wall things, but they came nowhere near reaching the high ceiling, because a few years earlier the design of the school had been to have a giant Resource Center and Library, and teachers and groups of students would ideally meet in sections of the massive room, and that would be school.… more
In Draft
“He was always chasing the next draft of himself.”
American critic Dwight Garner, in the New York Times Book Review on February 16 of this year, was describing the childhood of Henry James.
An expandable list comes to mind, some of our memorable figures moving toward the next draft of themselves: Anne Shirley, Holden Caulfield, Jo March, Jody Baxter, Arnold Spirit, Jr.,… more
Dear Peacemakers
In recent weeks, we’ve had many requests for books about anger and fear and conflict resolution.
I was immediately reminded of an excellent resource published in 2010 called Book by Book: an Annotated Guide to Young People’s Literature with Peacemaking and Conflict Resolution Themes (Carol Spiegel, published by Educators for Social Responsibility, now called Engaging Schools).… more
At the Dying of the Year
by Virginia Euwer Wolff
Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow…
—Richard Wilbur, “Year’s End”
We all have our circles of particularly mourned lost ones. As our hemisphere darkens down in this elegiac season of the winter equinox, and death has been so relentlessly in the air during 2015, I wave my own little flags of gratitude to some of my mentors and accidental teachers.… more
Skinny Dip with Melanie Heuiser Hill
What’s the first book you remember reading?
Ramona the Pest. My elementary school was visited by RIF (Reading is Fundamental) twice a year—the best days of the year. You had to be in second grade to peruse the tables of novels that were set up in the entry-way to our school. It was enormously exciting—so many to choose from!… more
Catch You Later, Traitor Companion Booktalks
To get you started on the Bookstorm™ Books …
America in the 1950s Edmund Lindop with Sarah Decapua
21st Century Books, 2010 Topic-centered chapters, e.g.: the transition from WWII, the Korean War, the 50’s economy and society, the Red Scare Photo-illustrated Report material galore, including substantial back matter
America in the 1950s Edmund Lindop with Sarah Decapua
21st Century Books, 2010 Topic-centered chapters, e.g.: the transition from WWII, the Korean War, the 50’s economy and society, the Red Scare Photo-illustrated Report material galore, including substantial back matter
Bat 6
Virginia Euwer Wolff
Scholastic, 1998 In rural Oregon not long after WWII, the annual softball game between 6th grade girls from two towns is a cauldron of secrets, simmering racism, class divide, hope and friendship.
… more 
Scholastic, 1998 In rural Oregon not long after WWII, the annual softball game between 6th grade girls from two towns is a cauldron of secrets, simmering racism, class divide, hope and friendship.
Virginia Euwer Wolff: Considering Flaubert
by Virginia Euwer Wolff
For years I’ve taken primitive comfort in Gustave Flaubert’s mid-nineteenth century remark in a letter to a friend: “Last week I spent five days writing one page.”
And Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac reminded us (Dec. 12, 2014) that Flaubert often put in a comma one day and took it out the next. Yes, sure, fine, yeah, we all do that, and we can tell the keyboard, or the cat, whoever keeps us company, that in these insertions and deletions we’re honoring Flaubert and the noble tradition.… more
Skinny Dip with Virginia Euwer Wolff
What’s your favorite holiday tradition?
I have so many favorites. One of them is the hanging of the Christmas stockings. My aunt made felt and appliqué stockings for my two tiny children in the 1960s. Thirty years later, my daughter made felt and appliqué stockings for her husband, their two children, and me. She designed the appliqué motifs to reflect each family member.… more
