Debra Frasier’s Very Occasional Newsletter
| |
|
October is Vocabulary Parade Month!
| |
|
Miss Alaineus Vocabulary-inspired Parades are on the march. Enjoy this one-minute video from Cincinnati’s Corryville Catholic Vocabulary Parade, sponsored by a Box Tops for Education grant!
Considering offering signed paperback books as Vocabulary Parade prizes? Write me!
| |
You can also watch this video on Box Tops for Education's website.
| |
Want to inspire your classroom? Consider a Skype author visit. Write for information.
| |
| Visit my website for more Vocabulary Parade resources and see more costume ideas at this Vocabulary Parade Pinterest board. (Note: A Miss Alaineus Vocabulary Parades can be crafted to fit any budget. Schools have held parades with ingenuously decorated grocery bags and cardboard boxes!)
| |
Real Life: Nov. 2014 - Oct. 2017
| |
First there was the heart attack. After the successful insertion of five stents surrounding my husband's heart chamber, I sat in the overlit Minneapolis/St Paul hospital and thought: Things have to get simpler.
But getting simpler was a lot more complicated than I ever expected.
| |
Now we have survived multiple white-knuckle moving truck drives across country, we have made it through crowded temporary lodgings, we have made it through dark dips of depression and rebounded, we have deeply missed old friends while learning to meet new ones, we have opened and closed temporary studios, filled storage units with appalling heaps of boxes even while casting off equally appalling piles—we HAVE simplified. But neither of us expected the difficulties of starting anew six decades into life, even in a place like Asheville, NC, where we left a piece of our hearts in our twenties.
| |
But life is LIFE, always moving, and big moments shined throughout this chaos...We arrived in North Carolina in December of 2015, just in time to join a circle of old friends who were seeing our 82-year-old Paulus Berensohn into his last year and a half—and so our Penland NC journey has been marked this summer by the June death and green burial of my beloved mentor and friend, and the joyful wedding of a child born at Penland 31 years ago.
| |
|
Last month we moved into the house and studios we designed and built in a city neighborhood in Asheville, NC. I am writing you from that new studio!
| |
Throughout ALL the aforementioned chaos I’ve traveled with a picture book project, The Captain Is a Duck! (This is to be my contribution to inspiring imaginative invention out of everyday stuff in a child's room.)
| |
Sometimes this book and I have been on friendly terms despite the chaos, and other times we’ve been at odds: “Why can’t you be EASY?!” I have cried, stamped, and grumbled. We are friends right now, and in retrospect, I am grateful for the accompaniment, hard as it has been to hold the focus. The end is near, but STILL not easy!
| |
| Your room in the Blue Ridge Mountains?
| |
Our little cabin-in-the-woods, one half mile from Penland School of Crafts, is now for rent. It is offered officially only on the school's site and is rented primarily by students and friends (like you) who need a week on a mountaintop to be quiet, think, write, hike, sit or attend classes at Penland.
| |
| And if you like good food...
| |
|
The cabin’s location is one hour NE of Asheville NC, and while here you can visit Knife and Fork in Spruce Pine for the most delicious farm-to-fork food. Tell Chef Nate (James Beard nominated chef) that I sent you! Watch this five-minute video by Food Inspiration International and catch the one-half second of me at the lunch counter!
| |
|
|
|
|
