Saturday, September 19, 2009

My Willoughbian Hero

I'm pretty sure that I met my new hero on Friday night. She took us on an trip through her life...she told stories about her family and friends. She was clever and quick witted..and I could tell just by the way she talked that she was passionate about her writing. Her name is Lois Lowry and I got to sit in a room with her and shake her had after her presentation.


For those of you who had to google her name to see who she is...shame on you. She wrote one of my very favorite books, The Giver. As an interesting fact Lois Lowry actually took the picture that adorns the classic cover of The Giver...her favorite shot of him that she wanted to use was one in which he didn't look so sinister, but he had a band-aid on his finger. And in those days they couldn't just photo shop it out.

She closed her presentation by talking about her book The Willoughby's. As the book has many large words and is geared towards a younger audience, she chose to include definitions of the larger words. She ended, appropriately given her audience, by reading her definition of the word affable from the book, "Affable means good-natured and friendly. There are whole groups of people known for being affable. Cheer leaders, for example. Or Mormon missionaries."

She received thunderous applause.

3 comments:

Starr said...

I thought she was a lot older. I've known her books my entire life & I thought that most of her works were published in the 40s or before -- I guess because of the artwork.

Is she LDS? Or just kind enough to make a stop on the book tour to say "Hi" to the students at BYUI

Brooke said...

That's awesome. When I was in 4th grade I won a writing contest and got to meet one of my favorite authors (at the time) Dean Hughes. It's amazing the talent that so many authors have, and she sounds like quite the lady! What a great experience!

emily said...

She actually is not LDS, but certainly was kind enough to drop by our campus!