Tag Archives: reading

Serials in the 21st Century

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Keep Your Eye on AmandaThe first serial I wrote was Keep Your Eye on Amanda. Chapter 1 appeared in the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph on October 3, 1996. Readers loved it. Authors found new readers. (I recall riding a NY subway, watching an old man read a chapter of The Secret School in the NY Post.) Other newspapers joined in. Readers clamored for it. Teachers used it in classes, grandparents shared it with distant grandchildren. 

Though I remained the nominal head of the company, Linda Wright took it over, transforming it into a unique publishing venture. The name Breakfast Serials was introduced. Other authors joined in. Katherine Paterson. Linda Sue Park. Joseph Bruchac, among others. Illustrators Brian Floca, Emily Arnold McCully, Timothy Bush. 

Under Ms. Wright, the growth of Breakfast Serials was extraordinary, eventually reaching a circulation figure of thirty-three million! It probably became—in terms of readers—the biggest publisher in the world. All, as it were, beneath the radar. But just as Breakfast Serials expanded around the world, the US press—under the internet onslaught—virtually tanked. What to do?

Instant Serials

Ms. Wright regrouped and has now invented a way to make serialization available online, as Instant Serials. Here, terrific stories and great art are available in serialized form, along with a means of chatting (online, with no smack talk) about the stories. The reader (parent, grandparent, and teacher) sets the release dates of successive chapters. Which means readers will still have to laugh, cry, and wait … a little. Quite amazing.

Readers Theater

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ART

Author Readers Theater with (l to r) Avi, Sarah Weeks, Pam Muñoz Ryan, and Richard Peck, one cast among our revolving players.

Have you considered doing Readers Theater in your classroom or assembly performance? It’s a fun and instructional way to get inside of a book, involving students firsthand in dialogue, action, and plot. Here’s an article about readers theater I wrote for School Library Journal a few years ago: “Have You Heard the Word? For a low-budget way to get kids wild about reading, try readers theater.“

As I wrote in the article, my “experiences led me to create Authors Readers Theatre (ART) in 2006 with fellow writers Sharon Creech, Walter Dean Myers, and Sarah Weeks. Functioning as a kind of repertory theater group with an evolving core of author-performers, we have been performing readers theater all over the country…”

Authors Readers Theater is still going strong. For information about the troupe, please visit Sarah Weeks’ website.

There are two free readers theater scripts on my website: one is for Ereth’s Birthday and the other is for The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle. They may be just the spark you need to involve more students in the joys of reading. I encourage you to give readers theater a try, if you haven’t already.

A singular connection

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The Secret SchoolLast week, when at a conference at Shenandoah University, I was asked to sign a copy of The Secret School. First, however, I was told a story. The book belonged to a girl, and her father, a US soldier in Afghanistan, had taken a copy with him. Via Skype, he read the book to his daughter, chapter by chapter from afar. I was touched by this account, not least by the notion that this man chose to take a book along to read to his child, when surely he is limited by what he can carry. There are all kinds of honors given to authors, and I have had my share of them, but this was a singular one. Sometimes, in the world of children’s’ books, we forget that one of the most vital things we writers do is facilitate connections, not merely between author and reader, but between parent and child, teacher and child, grandparent and child . .  . And so forth. What is worth celebrating is not the author. Truly, it’s about those connections. We should never forget that.

Reading from my work

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Avi ReadingOn June 26th I will be at the Shenandoah University (Winchester, VA) 2012 Children’s Literature Conference. Along with other writers and illustrators we will focus on the conference theme, literature for boys. While I will take part in a couple of panel discussions, I will have a solo spot, doing what I most enjoy at conferences, reading from my work. Over the years I have delivered my share of formal speeches, but some years ago, I decided to do something more challenging, for me at least. I hired a professional theatre director and a voice teacher and asked them to work with me to put together and perform a program of readings, selections from my own writing. It’s a form of reader’s theatre, but in this case I am the only performer. I learned to adjust my writing, at times cutting and even rewriting, so as to make each episode dramatic, intense, and more suitable to an auditory experience. I learned learn how to respond to a live audience, to vary my voice, to create distinct characters, and but most of all to bring energetic life to my own words. I am not a natural performer, but for a performance to work, I need to throw myself into my words. When it is successful, it is deeply rewarding for me—as a writer. I get a response that is palpably there. As for the audience, they are entertained for an hour. We all—I hope— have a great time.