Hope Edelman's Blog, page 5

Kids Who Hear Voices

According to this article, sent to me by my friend Ann, the phenomenon is a lot more common that we would think. A group of Dutch medical researchers, publishing in the British Journal of Psychiatry, studied a group of 8- and 9-year-olds to find out how many of them heard voices that other people couldn't hear. Ten percent of them reported having what the researchers call "verbal auditory hallucinations." Sixteen percent of children and teens are believed to hear such voices. That's almost on...

Trash Cans Never Sounded So Good

Took the girls to see Stomp on Tuesday night--the street percussion troupe that makes music out of every ordinary object known to mankind. Sheesh, they were good. We don't typically do things like this on a school night, Hollywood being a solid 45 minute drive from the house without traffic, but I lucked into half-price tickets that were available only midweek so figured, Just this once: why not? And to make it even extra special, since we got there a half hour early, we made a Pinkberry run ...

Help for Haiti's Orphans

Like everyone else, I was glued to the internet in the 72 hours after the earthquake in Haiti, driven by an insatiable need for the minute details (inveterate nonfiction instructor that I am). How, exactly, were people being extracted from the rubble? Could all the reports about people going without any food and water for 72 hours be accurate, and if so, how was everyone still walking around? Who was doing what to help reunite parents and children, and how? And thinking, my god, all these...

Haiti Fatigue?

Like everyone else, I was glued to the internet in the 72 hours after the earthquake in Haiti, driven by an insatiable need for the minute details (good nonfiction instructor that I am). How, exactly, were people being pulled from the rubble? Could all these reports about people going without any food and water for 72 hours be accurate, and if so, how was everyone still walking around? Who was doing what to help reunite parents and children, and how? Thinking my god, all these people, all thi...

Back in Blogging Mode

Ay yi yi, I'm not really fulfilling my end of the bargain here, am I? I can't figure out exactly what keeps me from blogging more often than I do. Though I have some ideas:
1. My own internal standards of perfection. Blogging, by nature, is a relatively off-the-cuff enterprise. Have thought, type it out, hit send. For someone who labors over every paragraph for hours, by nature, that's a foreign concept. And an unsettling one. Result: avoidance.
2. Time. Well, we all know about that one. Two ki...

Virtually Yours

The national book tour ended about a week and a half ago, covering 15 cities in about eight weeks. Many thanks to everyone at home and elsewhere who made it such a memorable trek. From the SheWrites.com salon at Wicki's loft in NYC all the way to Tami's invention of the Possibilitini Martini in South Florida (see recipe below) it was an illuminating two-month dialogue with readers and new friends that I'll not soon forget.

I'm now on Day Two of a virtual book tour, which involves a lot less ph...

Writing About the Extraordinary

One of the best parts of being a nonfiction writing instructor is watching students transform over the course of a week as their stories come into focus and take shape. Not just because of the excitement that comes from watching a text emerge, but from witnessing the personal changes that takes place as they reach greater insights about what they've experienced and what it means in a larger, universal sense.

I had a similar experience while writing The Possibility of Everything. I spent twel...

Confessions of a Closet Mystic

As I've been traveling around the country, talking about the book and meeting readers, the number one question I hear is, "How much does Maya remember from your trip?"

Not "What does she remember from your trip?" or "Who does she remember from your trip?" but "How much?"

I find this a curious question, since I can't imagine what difference the quantity of a child's memories, nine years later, could really makes to a reader. So there must be a question behind this question, some impulse that mak...

Reporting from the Sacbe

Dr. Rosita sent me an email the other day that said, "Still on the Sacbe?" and it made me laugh out loud. Sacbes were the ancient Maya white plastered roads that ran from town to town, and between key points within cities. Yes, I'm still on the metaphoric sacbe, until November 19, at which point I get to go home and...take a three-day nap.

I'm in the Portland Airport now, about to take flight number 15 of 18 in total. Last night I did event number 21 out of 29. Whew.

Seriously. It's the longes...

A View from the Bay

Yesterday in San Francisco, I appeared on a local daytime TV show called The View from the Bay. It's been a while--at least two years--since I've done any TV, and to say I was rusty was a big understatement. I arrived at the ABC studio on Front Street minus a clean copy of my own book (bad, bad author!) and without any prep or practice at all.

Amazingly, it went well anyway.

These are the nicest, and I mean the nicest, staff and hosts I've come across in a long time. Everyone from Spencer Chri...