Visiting classes worldwide

Dur­ing the course of the last school year—September to June—I did some 36 Skype vis­its with class­es. These were class­es all over the Unit­ed States and from Thai­land to Cana­da. This way of vis­it­ing with class­es has enor­mous advan­tages for both the schools and for me. For class­es doing author stud­ies, the vis­it can be a mean­ing­ful con­clud­ing (or begin­ning) event, dur­ing which time they can ask me ques­tions about my books and writ­ing process about which they are curi­ous. My goal is to respond to each stu­dent and ques­tion in a per­son­al way, so that the young read­er feels some direct contact.

Thus, the teacher for my last Skype ses­sions was kind enough to write, “The stu­dents loved that they were able to ask you ques­tions and receive a per­son­al­ized response from you. One stu­dent not­ed she loved the way each answer was unique, even when ques­tions were sim­i­lar. Anoth­er boy said he real­ly liked how you spent qual­i­ty time with each stu­dent respond­ing to his or her question.”

On my part, I get to engage with my read­ers and gain a sense of what they enjoy (or do not enjoy) about my work. I also get a feel for whom my read­ers are, which nev­er fails to feed into my thoughts and work in progress.

Class­es which read a vari­ety of my books tend to have more inter­est­ing ques­tions than class­es which focus on a par­tic­u­lar book—though that can work. While vir­tu­al­ly all class­es dis­cuss what ques­tions will be asked ahead of time, when time is allowed for spon­tane­ity, orig­i­nal and even sur­pris­ing ques­tions are asked. That is some­thing I always love. Fur­ther­more, it always enrich­es the dis­cus­sion when teach­ers them­selves are involved in the read­ing and questions.

Meet­ing and talk­ing to my read­ers is always pos­i­tive for me. For the school and class, it is also vast­ly less expen­sive and dis­rup­tive for the school and class. Liv­ing in a remote, rur­al area, I love the free­dom to vis­it so many places, many of them small com­mu­ni­ties that rarely can have an author vis­it. That said, I often con­nect with big city class­es, too. In short, stu­dents and writer can join hands, voic­es, and books anywhere.