When you look at the date on my first picture, I am sure I will not need to explain why the JambaLAya event was cancelled or why there has not been another scheduled in the last two years. Our Mississippi/Louisiana group has met monthly for many years with regular meetings to catch up on what’s happening in the children’s writing world and to connect with friends. Regular meetings included critique sessions where members read works in progress and got advice from partner writers. In the B C world (Before Covid), the meetings looked like the second picture. JambaLAya was added as an annual weekend event that brought in editors, agents, and experts to add to the mix.
This last Saturday was our first attempt to retrieve this yearly special event. Using caution, it was planned for two Zoom meetings on Thursday and Friday nights with just Saturday in person with all attendees furnishing proof of vaccination and a recommendation that all would wear masks. Even so, one of the leaders, one of the presenters, and several attendees had to miss after testing positive for Covid.
Making the best of things even though we’ve always relied on our missing leader as our technology crutch, we moved right along. My favorite sessions were led by our very own members. Marti Dumas exuberantly explained how reading aloud would help each of us to find our voice. She had so much energy that I fully expected her to need a nap when she was finished, but she hung in there with the rest of us.
Leslie Staub, picture book writer and illustrator, followed with a very practical method of putting a picture book together. She had a white board with fifteen spaces for each page of the book. Then she gave labels for each of the pages that outlined both the character arc and story arc. I couldn’t wait to see where my current effort at a picture book would fit. I had the spaces already drawn on a corkboard I use for this purpose. You can see from the picture that I have two labels left over. I also need to see if my arcs rise and fall where the labels indicate.
After the meeting ended, I heard murmurings over supper at the Blue Crab with other attendees. They were eager to get home and try out what they had learned. Truth to tell, while they seemed to agree that the meeting was informative, inspirational, and helpful, everybody seemed to have the same opinion that the best part of all was being back together again – even if we did have to wear our masks and prove that we had been vaccinated.