LITERATURE + LECTURES

Blue Willow Bookshop presents a Special Storytime with Anna Dewdney, Tuesday, November 30 at 10am. It’s Llama time! We welcome Anna Dewdney, author and illustrator of the Llama, Llama picture books. She will be in town for a special storytime and will share Llama, Llama Holiday Drama with our Blue Willow friends.

In Llama, Llama Holiday Drama, Llama Llama and Mama Llama rush around, shopping for presents, baking cookies, decorating the tree . . . but how long is it until Christmas? Will it ever come? Finally, Llama Llama just can’t wait any more! It takes a cuddle from Mama Llama to remind him that “Gifts are nice, but there’s another: The true gift is, we have each other.”

The author writes:  The most important thing to know about me, really, is that I’m a mom.  I live in a big old house in Vermont with two scruffy dogs, and I spend a lot of time on the road, mostly visiting my two daughters (who attend boarding school and college!), as well as schools and libraries. I talk at conferences, and I go visit my publisher in New York. But mostly, I spend my time at home, sketching, writing, and painting. I spend at least an hour a day in the woods, running and walking with my dogs, and I love to putter around outside, planning gardens and cutting down trees. My boyfriend, Reed, comes to visit when he has a free moment, but mostly I am by myself, making pictures and writing stories. It’s a pretty good life, and it took me a long time to get here.

Alice, my little sister, liked dressing up and playing pretend with me, and she also really liked beautiful, fancy things. Now she has a fancy store in Brattleboro, Vermont, called Dragonfly Drygoods, filled with beautiful things, and she has two little kids of her own. I am lucky that she lives nearby, too!

I’ve had a lot of paying jobs over the years: waitress, furniture salesperson, daycare provider, teacher (I also drove the school bus), mail carrier (that was probably my favorite “real” job...), but through it all, I drew pictures, sometimes for money, and wrote...although no one bought my stories until a few years ago.

I come from a family of five -- mom, dad, and three girls, Tanya, Anna, and Alice.

My mom is a really cool mom. She is also a writer. You may have read her book, Only Brave Tomorrows, by Winifred Luhrmann. I am lucky that I still get to spend time with my parents because they live nearby.

My Dad is a doctor. He reads a lot, and likes to collect books. When my sisters and I were little, he used to read to us from A. A. Milne's POOH books. Now, whenever I read them to my own children or to myself, I hear his voice.

My older sister Tanya went away to school when I was only seven years old, so I didn't spend too much time with her when I was little. She was always reading serious books and using big words. I guess that's what she likes to do, because now she writes serious books and uses lots of big words when she teaches at the Stanford University. She still gets silly, sometimes, though, and we have a lot of fun when we get together. Tanya's latest book is Of Two Minds; the Growing Disorder in American Psychiatry.