When I was writing Little Blog, I tried looking around for camps like this and couldn’t find any, though there are several farms that will allow you to visit and camp out and help. These visits can include meals and quasi luxurious platform tent camping and run up to $300 a night.

But then…bingo! This past summer, a couple named Mark and Gail Hall, and their college student-age son James, spent a weekend living in a frontier cabin at Genesee Country Village Museum in upstate New York. They were fully indoctrinated before they took on the challenge and trained in how to perform the endless amounts of work that lifestyle required. And they only had to do it for two days. So how was it? I can only wonder how they fared. Perhaps I will look around to see if I can find a write up of their experience somewhere online.

Little Blog’s editor told me she saw an article about similar camps in the New York Times, but I haven’t been able to track it down. And a reader wrote me just the other day describing a trip her family took when she was a teenager, following the path of the Oregon trail…in a covered wagon. The food was better though: she remembers tons of cans of potato sticks. Potato sticks? Frontier food? Interesting….

Where I’ll teach any and all how to make butter.

And where I will not wear a bonnet.

(I’m not kidding about either of those things.)

For more info on the festival, go to: www.princeton.lib.nj.us/children/festival/index.html

Anyway, I have a story idea in my mind right now, and as I’m waiting a few days to hear back from an editor on an idea I want to turn into my next book, I think I might just take a crack at it. Here’s what I’m thinking will be the opening line:

Ally, Jennifer, Kate and I were the only mothers in Classroom K-203 who took the subway into work after drop off. We started the kindergarten year bumping into one another on the platform, then waiting up when we’d see the other on the sidewalk outside school. Pretty soon we’d become a group. Except for Thursdays when Ally’s husband dropped off so she could get in early for a staff meeting, we’d meet up in the hall outside the classroom, walk together the two blocks to the F train, and talk the whole way into the city, hanging onto poles and straps as the F train labored from stop to stop, hestitating and jerking its way up ramps, into tunnels and faster and faster toward midtown where we all, the four of us, and sometimes we felt like we were the only ones––had jobs.

We talked and listened. This was before any of us had had coffee, but still, these conversations were wild, as if our lives depended on it.

….

Okay! Here I go…

This plant is a descendant––a cutting of a cutting of a cutting––of one that belonged to my great grandmother. Between second and sixth grades, my mother, sister and I lived in a tiny, crumbling half-a-house in downtown Princeton. It had no shower, only a claw foot tub in the tiny bathroom. My mom filled a shelf at the faucet end of the tub with a row of these plants and the stiff leaves used to rub my feet when I ducked under to rinse my hair. Terrifying. Never noticed seeing a single one bloom. But as an adult, here they are, with these gorgeous and fleeting flowers. I photograph them every time they bloom as if it’s possible to hold on.

I put out copies of Slipping and Little Blog to show kids who were getting to know me why I’m interested in leading the club––because I want to spend time thinking about how they read. A girl, who didn’t connect the copy of Slipping with me yet, pulled the book to her chest possessively and said, “This was the BEST book.” I tried to act too cool to be thrilled, but I was THRILLED. So often the feedback comes from people I know. For a stranger to have pulled it off the shelf and then LOVED it. Nothing is better.

It’s been a tricky fall for writing, figuring out what will come next in my life, and this blog is beginning to feel somewhat fake. What purpose does it serve? I get comments every day in my inbox–all from bizarre robots trying to trick me into thinking they’ve read your posts––thanking me for the “article” and saying they will “use this information for sure in growing my business.” What business could possibly make use of my stories of learning to read as a child? No wonder our economy is going down hill!

But hearing that student’s comment gave me a boost in confidence. Slipping is a good book. I’m glad I wrote it. I’m thrilled its out in the world. Little Blog too. They are both extremely personal and I feel like I want this blog space to be that way as well.

Cheers, Cathleen

It was just simply wonderful to feel this validation all week, whenever I put my head up for air––I’ve been organizing a pie sale at school. We were planning for 20-30 pies and ended up selling 74 and having to find people to bake all of them!

Here’s a link to the list.

http://www.txla.org/groups/lone-star

The other authors and books are:

Paolo Bacigalupi, Ship Breaker
Cathleen Davitt Bell, Little Blog on the Prairie
Robin Brande, Fat Cat
Ally Carter, Heist Society
Tera Lynn Childs, Forgive My Fins
Ally Condie, Matched
Carl Deuker, Payback Time
Erin Dionne, The Total Tragedy of a Girl Named Hamlet
Brian Falkner, Brain Jack
Catherine Fisher, Incarceron
Donna Gephart, How to Survive Middle School
Julia Golding, Dragonfly
Jason Henderson, Vampire Rising
David Klass, Stuck on Earth
Polly Shulman, The Grimm Legacy
Neal Shusterman, Bruiser
Jordan Sonnenblick, After Ever After
Francisco X Stork, The Last Summer of the Death Warriors
Deborah Wiles, Countdown
Richard Yancey, The Monstrumologist

I felt so red and prickly at the very idea of dressing up in the clothes (to paraphrase David Sedaris’ observations of people dressed up on the street in costumes handing out flyers to sell thing: “I just hope I never get what he has.) I had the idea of challenging readers to put the bonnet on. Go ahead, I said. You too can understand how horrible it was for Gen to get forced to wear this by her mom.

I took hundreds of photos. Then, with the help of my lawyer husband I realized I had to get WAIVERS to put kids’ images online. So here’s a legal sampling. Enjoy!

The Bonnet Cam Slideshow

http://www.redbookmag.com/kids-family/advice/unplugged-vacation?click=main_sr

I saw something about this kind of farm vacation last year in the Times. http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/08/26/dining/26farms.html

You go on vacation to someone’s farm. Just like in the book.