The world today lost not only a wonderful writer but a wonderful woman with the death of Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Ann Johnson, who passed away in her North Carolina home this Wednesday, May 28, at age 86.

 Angelou once said that it was her goal in writing to "write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine...before she realizes she's reading." As a reader, I say she met this goal. Her best known book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, is her autobiography from age 7 to 16 and depicts life in the Jim Crow South as well as the personal horrors she endured. I first read it in middle school and it remains today one of the books that has influenced me the most. The author of staggering beautiful poetry as well as a dancer and singer, Angelou was also an advocate of justice, education, and equality who worked alongside Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Today, Angelou flies away from us but leaves her work as guidance for our own flight. I rejoice for the blessings the world received from her life and take comfort in the words she leaves us. Maya Angelou, you opened so many cages - may you now sing to us all from the skies. And may we all remember her by continuing to pay it forward to others with our words, actions, and time.

Angelou in a 2009 interview with CNN: "Our country needs us all right now to stand up and be counted. We need to try to be great citizens. We are necessary in this country, and we need to give something -- that is to say, go to a local hospital, go to the children's ward and offer to the nurse in charge an hour twice a month that you can give them reading children's stories or poetry," she said. "And go to an old folks' home and read the newspaper to somebody. Go to your church or your synagogue or your mosque, and say, 'I'd like to be of service. I have one hour twice a month.You'll be surprised at how much better you will feel. And good done anywhere is good done everywhere."

CNN posted a beautiful obituary of Maya Angelou. Read it here.

Since revisions for The Boy Next Door are keeping me insanely busy, for the next couple of weeks I'll only be posting once a week on Wednesdays about what I'm reading for VCFA homework. This week I'm swooning over David Levithan's Boy Meets Boy. This novel is a sweet romance between two high school boys, Paul and Noah, and I loved the phrasings used in their early relationship scenes. Especially favorite was this passage:

    "The first bell rings and I'm not sure what we'll do - is there a way to acknowledge our newfound closeness without being one of those couples who can't get through the day without a loud hallway snog?
    It's Noah who finds the answer, without me having to ask the question. "I'll see you later," he says, and as he does, he runs his finger briefly over my wrist. It passes me over like air, and makes me shiver like a kiss." (Levithan 79).

     The cast of characters was laugh out loud funny, especially Infinite Darlene, the high school's star quarterback and homecoming queen. The setting was definitely utopian but fitting for the story, since it allowed the focus to stay mostly on Paul and Noah's relationship and not on their sexual orientation.

    Boy Meets Boy was the April selection for the Swoon Reads book club, feel free to join the discussion here.

Extra teaching duties this week kept me from posting a Technique Tuesday reflection, so today is a change-up from the usual: a "Way with Words" Wednesday. The past couple of days, I've been devouring Jennifer Donnelly's A Northern Light. Here's just a few of the reasons why:

Romance, history, and a murder mystery could produce a page turning book enough on their own, but Donnelly is brilliant at setting up page turns such as this one, which ends a first page description of a perfect summer day in the North Woods and the belief that all days will go on like this: "I believe these things. With all my heart. For I am good at telling myself lies" (Donnelly 1).

Donnelly doesn't shy away from the harshness of life and I loved the raw emotion in the scene where narrator Mattie goes to visit her childhood friend, Minnie, after the birth of Minnie's twins. Minnie's cabin is a mess and she's trying to breastfeed both babies at once. She hands the babies to Mattie to get tea for her visitor. Mattie has trouble hiding her reaction to the babies:
"I was trying to settle them, so they'd stop screaming, so the wet from the diapers wouldn't soak into my skirt, when the next thing I knew, Minnie was standing over me, her arms at her side, her hands clenched.
    "Give them to me! Give them back! Don't look at them like that! Don't look at me! Just get out! Go! Get out of here!" she shouted.
    "Min...I...I'm sorry! I wasn't...I didn't mean..."
    But it was too late. Miinie was hysterical. She crushed the babies to here and started to cry. "You hate them, don't you, Mattie? Don't you?"
    "Minnie! What are you saying?"
    "I know you do. I hate them, too. Sometimes. I do." Her voice had dropped to a whisper. Her eyes were tormented" (Donnelly 271).

And the descriptions, oh the character descriptions! "Once I saw Beth lift her head at the sound of a coyote's cry at twilight. Her eyes widened - half in wonder, half in fear - and I saw that she would be beautiful someday. Not just pretty, truly beautiful. I saw the restlessness in Lawton long before he left. I saw it when he was only a boy and would toss sticks and leaves into the rushing waters of the Moose River and watch them go where he could not" (Donnelly 280).

My copy is filled with sticky notes marking even more favorite passages, but for now I have to get back to my own writing.

Dear Mom,

Thank you for feeding me
    love
    stories
    and even tofu
it will make a great scene in a novel someday.

Thank you for being a model of what a loving relationship looks like
    for being open and honest and listening without judging
    for welcoming my friends into our home.
You were and still are the “cool” mom.

You taught me
    that it's okay for moms to have their own dreams
    that it's never too late to seek dreams
    that it's hard and it's scary
And it's worth every minute of it all.

Without you, I never would have even considered
    that writers are grown
    not born
and that I could become one, too.

Because of your love and support I became
    a teacher
    a skater
    a mother
    an author
and that is only the start of my journey.

Forget Shakespeare
    one hundred and fifty-four sonnets
    couldn't begin
to describe what you mean to me.

You are
    my thing with feathers
    my dream keeper
    you showed me the road less traveled and that has made all the difference

Even Dickinson, Hughes, and Frost aren't enough.
No poet in the world has enough words to sing my love song for you.

Happy Mother's Day.

Love, Katie

They say a picture's worth a thousand words, so about 65 pictures makes a great YA novel, right? Maybe not, but I find a little visual inspiration never hurts when I'm writing, just so long as I don't spend so long on Pinterest that my husband asks if I've fallen in...

At the Swoon Reads twitter chat last night, one of the questions that we first list panel members were asked was if our ideas came from real life or our imaginations. My answer? Imagination inspired by real life. This is true for not only plot events and dialogue but also for descriptions of characters and settings. I find pictures especially useful for helping me show character's emotions, what that emotion looks like on their faces and in their body language.

Google Maps is a great resource for setting as well, since you can use street view to get snapshots of places where your characters live or visit. A scene I'm working on for Kiss and Cry involves a drive through the Rocky Mountains and into Utah and Google Maps meant I could "drive" their route through snapshots. And if a picture's worth a thousand words, how much more for a movie? I also love YouTube videos for research. Since I personally don't enjoy seafood, I've never eaten a lobster. But I could learn exactly how to do it on YouTube.

Do you have a favorite source for visual inspiration? Please share by leaving a comment. Thanks!

P.S. For those who missed the twitter chat, I leaked that there's a new Halloween scene coming to The Boy Next Door. If you want spoilers, check out my The Boy Next Door board on Pinterest.

This week I'm highlighting a couple of blogs that I recently came across and would've loved to know about earlier. YA Fusion is written by a large team of popular YA authors, including Katie McGarry and Huntley Fitzpatrick. It's a mash-up of writing/publishing advice, author/agent interviews, and so much more. One of my favorite recent posts was Everything I Know About Dialogue I learned in Drama School. Also, check out the books page for great reads written by the YA Fusion bloggers.

Sporty Girls Books is a blog and web site that features...you guessed it. I love their lists of MG and YA books featuring sporty heroines, their general promotion of girls in sports, and this recent post about Karen Avivi's BMX book, Shredded.

Have a great weekend and I'd love to hear your comments about your favorite YA blogs!