Library of the Early Mind

  If you're looking to be inspired to really step up your craft, then find this movie!  This month's SCBWI meeting showed a screening of the documentary Library of the Early Mind and I love, love, loved it.  Listening to your favorite authors who you've idolized since childhood talk about their work, is just the best medicine for the ails of writer's block (procrastination) that I know of.  The deeper meaning that lies beneath some of the most endearing, fascinating, and spellbinding children's books throughout history will make you want to push your own writing that much further, to reach for heights you didn't think possible, to dive for depths you didn't know existed, to make your work truly great. 

Interviews include the amazing and magical likes of:

- Chris Van Allsburg (“Polar Express”)
- Daniel Handler (aka "Lemony Snicket")
- Gregory Maguire ("Wicked")
- Lois Lowry (“The Giver”)
- Jarrett J. Krosoczka (author, “Lunch Lady”)
- R. L. Stine (“Goosebumps”)
- Natalie Babbitt (“Tuck Everlasting”)
- Roger Sutton (Editor, The Horn Book)
- Jeff Kinney (“Diary of a Wimpy Kid”)
- Jane Yolen (author of more than 300 books)
- Norton Juster (“The Phantom Tollbooth”)
- David Small (“Stitches”)
- Lane Smith (illustrator, “Stinky Cheese Man”)
- Sarah Stewart (author, “The Money Tree”)
- Leslèa Newman (author, “Heather Has Two Mommies”)
- Brian Selznick (“Hugo Cabret”)
- Arthur A. Levine (editor, “Harry Potter”)
- Adam Gopnik (essayist, The New Yorker)
- Jack Gantos (author, “Rotten Ralph” series)
- Richard Michelson (author, “Across The Alley”)
- Mo Willems (author and illustrator)
- Françoise Mouly, (RAW and Toons Books)
- Peter H. Reynolds (author and illustrator)
- Mary Jane Begin (author and illustrator)
- Grace Lin (author and illustrator)
- Brian Pinkney (author and illustrator)
- M. T. Anderson (“Octavian Nothing”)
- Nancy Garden (author “Annie On My Mind”)
- Padma Venkatraman (author, “Climbing The Stairs”)
- Mary Downing Hahn (author, “Deep and Dark and Dangerous”)
- Leonard Marcus (children’s book historian and critic)
- Jerry Pinkney (author and illustrator, “The Lion and the Mouse”)
- Carolyn Coman (author, “What Jamie Saw”)
- Stephen Roxburgh (publisher, namelos)
- Anita Silvey (author, “Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Children's Book”)
- Mary Ann Hoberman (Children’s Poet Laureate)

To learn more, please visit the website:

http://www.libraryoftheearlymind.com/