Laura Purdie Salas

Writing the World for Kids

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Poetry Friday: Two Diamantes

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  My older daughter, like any self-respecting 15-year-old, does not want to spend tons of time with me. Unless her friends are all busy and she’s bored. One thing we do enjoy doing together is going to Caribou Coffee and writing poems together. We’ve only done this a few times, and one time was last […]

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Apostrophe Poem: To My Backup Disk

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Driving home from a meeting today, I decided to jump into Miss Rumphius’ Poetry Stretch for the week. I decided to write my poem to a necessity of life: the backup disk. To My Backup Disk Small silver circle You are the storage shedin the back yard of my mind filled with seeds of ideaswell-fertilized cover […]

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A Visitor for Bear

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[Addendum: The server hosting Bonny’s website is down momentarily. I hope by the time you read this, the links from her site will be working fine]  I’m thrilled to announce the fabulous Bonny Becker’s new picture book, A Visitor for Bear, which comes out this week! Bear is a curmudgeon who just wants to be left alone, […]

Flashy, Clashy, and Oh-So Splashy: Poems About Color

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   Last week, I received the author copies to the last book out of my set of 6 Capstone poetry books!  I think this was the third book I wrote in the series, and it presented a little bit of a special challenge. Because the theme of the book was color, I wasn’t quite sure whether […]

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Poetry Friday: A Billy Collins Poem

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  For Valentine’s Day, my husband gave me a CD of Billy Collins Live, a performance from 2005. He did this even though we don’t make a big deal over Valentine’s Day (our anniversary is the week before it) and we had agreed to do nothing more than cards. Oh well:>) I happily listened to […]

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This Is Just to Say, the Cybils Have Been Announced!

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The Cybils have been announced, and This Is Just to Say, by Joyce Sidman, won for poetry. Yea! This is one of my top two favorite poetry books of 2007 (and now both have won major awards, hint, hint). It was fun being on the nominating committee for the Cybils, and I’m so pleased that this […]

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Miss Rumphius’ poetry stretch: Metaphor Poem

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This week, Miss Rumphius challenged us to a metaphor poem. Last time I participated, I wrote a roundel about dreams. This morning, as I lay in bed at 4:30 trying to fall back asleep (I’ve been waking up early–even earlier than my usual 5:30 time—lately), metaphors for dreams started to float through my head. So I […]

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A Wee Taste o’ Scotland, Part 2: Music

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Yesterday, I shared some of the books and movies we’re reading and watching to get in the mood for Scotland. And I got some suggestions of ones to add to our list–thank you! The third part of the Scottish arts triumverate is music, of course. I love music, and while I’m not musically talented myself (be here […]

Aiming for a wee taste o’ Scotland

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My husband and I are going to Scotland in a few months! It will be our first real vacation by ourselves since we had kids, and our first trip overseas. To say we are excited is a bit of an understatement. To prepare for our trip, in addition to doing mountains (or maybe that should […]

Poetry Friday: Writing Haiku

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  I love haiku. They’re short and simple. I don’t mean they’re easy. Their simplicity is deceiving. But haiku is a form I love to write and to read. This month’s column on my website is called Do You Haiku?  In it, I share some published haiku I love, a few of my own haiku, […]

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