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I went to a marathon watching party this weekend, and I ran into my friend Katherine Center.  Not literally, because I was eating donuts, not running.  She wasn't running either, she was returning home from a literary event in Dallas, something that sounded sort of like an Iron Chefs for writers, although as she said, "Writers are so sensitive, they couldn't really judge us too harshly." Picture writers in the hands of Simon Cowell.

She said the people who put the event on thought that readings could be a little iffy sometimes, and they wanted to spice up the medium.  They had Nerf footballs and stuff. They had a ball, literary-ly.

Katherine's main job is writing books and doing literary stuff. My main job is editing books and doing publishing stuff. Net net, she goes to infinitely more readings than I do, so I hadn't exactly gotten the news that readings could be iffy.  I still put them in the category of the word from Mt. Sinai

Here in H'town we have a wonderful reading series put on by Inprint called The Margarett Root Brown Reading series. It brings amazing authors to town. Between my responsibilities at Bright Sky and my responsibilities at home, I don't get to go to these readings as often as my fancy Editorial Director title might insinuate, but when I do go, I am always transported.

I read with great delight in the New York Times that Zadie Smith has a new collection of essays just published. Stop everything and google Amazon. Like Katherine, maybe a little more famous, Zadie Smith is an amazing author.  I was first introduced to her at an Inprint reading. She is beautiful--in a completely Beauty of Different way--and smart, and as clever with words as any writer I have ever admired or analyzed for a grade.

Having stumbled into the reading that night at the invitation of a friend, I hadn't done any due diligence on who Zadie Smith was or what she wrote about. I vaguely remembered an unread copy of White Teeth on my shelf. As I listened to her in the velvet-seated darkness of the Wortham, I was blown away by her eloquence and her story's similarity to one of my all-time favorites, E.M. Forster.

Well, go figure. On Beauty, the book from which she read that night, was a reworking of Howard's End. Only so modern and so insightful it made me think that there was no time or space between me and not only Forster, but any great writer I have read. Hearing her read in her sexy Anglo tones from her gorgeous prose was an experience far beyond iffy, by anybody's definition. I've never been able to think of glee clubs the same way since.

So today, when my old friend Zadie popped up on my screen-saving NYT. I was delighted.  Her essays sound so fine to me, although of course our Overtly Intellectual Friends to the North had to rake them over the coals. In them, she talks about David Foster Wallace, and Zora Neale Hurston, of course Forster, and so many other people who have given us gifts of prose beyond panel--or New York Times-- judging.

I can't wait to get the book. And when I read it, I'll hear her beautiful voice in my mind. Just like I hear Katherine's lovely voice when we eat donuts and cheer for runners or when I read her books. It will be like Zadie is my friend, too.

Thanks to that iffy, old-school reading.

This is a beautiful novel about soulfulness. That it should be so is a tribute to Hurston's skill. She makes "culture" — that slow and particular and artificial accretion of habit and circumstance — seem as natural and organic and beautiful as the sunrise. She allows me to indulge in what Philip Roth once called "the romance of oneself," a literary value I dislike and yet, confronted with this beguiling book, cannot resist. She makes "black woman-ness" appear a real, tangible quality, an essence I can almost believe I share, however improbably, with millions of complex individuals across centuries and continents and languages and religions...
Almost — but not quite. That is to say, when I'm reading this book, I believe it, with my whole soul. It allows me to say things I wouldn't normally. Things like "She is my sister and I love her."

~Zadie Smith on Their Eyes Were Watching God

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
~E. M. Forster

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My favorite part of my job--even beyond the editing of manuscripts--is getting to know authors.  Authors we publish at Bright Sky, authors we don't publish, and even authors who are never published.  Authors are a magical tribe, with heightened sensitivities, longer than normal antennae, deeper than normal perception, and a whole host of other enhanced attributes. My daughter said it well: we were discussing publishing, and what the people I worked with were like, and she said, "It's like authors have x-ray eyes into your soul." It's like that.

I could write for six days on the intriguing nature of authors as a genre, rest on the seventh, and then begin pecking away through seventy  times seven weeks about the intriguing nature of authors as individuals.  But that is not what has me pondering right now.  What I am rolling around in the right side of my brain, and them pulling over to the left to try to articulate, is the concept of authors as vastly diverse kindred spirits. Default to metaphor.

Kindred spirits.  What a fabulous expression.  I think I'd like to invent a summer camp for grown ups by a beautiful lake in North Carolina or on the high desert plain in New Mexico and name it Kamp Kindred Spirits.  Attendance would be by invitation only--you could be invited by other campers or counselors, or you could invite yourself. If you felt you were a kindred spirit.

What would the qualifications be? A loving heart, an open mind, an excitement about the possibilities that life offers, a willingness to work, an inquisitive nature, and a belief that a deep, good spirit pervades our world.  After that, the more diverse the camp, the more interesting.  With a little forethought--about menus (make sure there are some vegetarian entrees, some gluten-free, and plenty of jalepenos) and sleeping arrangements (make sure that there are beds, hammocks, mats and sleeping bags--in both coed and single-sex cabins and under the starry skies) and about having someone on hand to keep the bathrooms sparkling so no one need bicker about whose turn it is to handle that-- everyone would be primed to enjoy the wonderland of each others' minds with no prosaic details to hinder connection.

Because Kamp Kindred Spirit--The Place for Happy Authors and Other Seekers, Storytellers and Shamen--would be all about connection. Sharing stories around the camp fire, making memories in Nature and commemorating them with fluent words, hearing  the nuances of the world from campers with deep expertise in far-flung arenas, reading and sharing beloved works of others who ought to be campers, but have moved on to be heavenly bodies or sea foam or dust in the wind. Using words to explain ourselves to the other campers and to bridge the gaps.

KKS would be an amazing place.  And the food would be amazing, too. In fact, the food and the wine would be so good that all the campers would be in constant danger of not fitting into their play clothes--be they sariis or lederhosen or Nike shorts or pajamas-- were it not for all the activities: yoga and tennis and golf and walking and rock climbing and hiking and spelunking and shuttlecock and bocce and a myriad of other pursuits, all there for the campers' well-being and pleasure.

Although I acknowledge this camp doesn't exist anywhere but my overly optimistic and romantic mind, many times I still feel like I have just returned from there.  After a lunch spent exploring the beauty of different with with Karen Walrond, after a relaxation session in our warehouse with Beth Irvine, after a journalling workshop with Angela Caughlin, after a book signing party with Mehrnaz Gill, after seeing Denise Hazen share the love in her message on televison, after hearing about a bird rescue from Bebe McCasland, or laughing at a political story of Peter Roussel's, or hearing about a great organic buffalo herd or a great Texas restaurant from John DeMers, or seeing one of Mike Marvin's inspired pictures of Big Bend or learning arcane and wonderful bits of Texas' history from Jim Bevill, or...the list goes on. Seven days a week.  From David Crockett to Kingdom Come, from Leah Richardson's gorgeous, spiritual southern interiors to Joy Fisher Hein's magical lakeside studio and the night-blooming gardens of Cherie Colburn: I go to Kamp Kindred Spirit every time I sit at my desk and open my email, every time I take a phone call from an author, and most importantly, every time I read the wisdom of these marvelous men and women in their manuscripts or see my world with new eyes through their art.

At Bright Sky, there are many kindred spirits, brought together through the irrational love of books, and the uncanny ability to work doggedly to get the things written and illustrated.  While I can tell you a little about a few of them in these few paragraphs, I cannot do justice to the stories and images that come so eloquently from their hearts onto the pages.  But I can recommend them to you: as authors, as artists, most importantly as fellow campers, an inspired group in which you might just find your own kindred spirit.

Grab a Bright Sky book, run--don't walk--to the coziest chair in your house.  Pour a glass of wine or brew some hot green tea, and gently crack the book's spine.  Imagine the author emerging like a genie from the pages and let yourself be transported.  When you do, you will know where my work takes me, and who my guides are on the journey.

It just looks like a desk job. 

Believing that sincerity and courage, honesty, kindness and truth, culminate in the spirit of Greystone, we pledge ourselves to strive, ever towards these high and noble ideals.
~Honor Council Pledge

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 When I was in college, I dated a boy from Virginia with a very large family.  Everywhere we went in the Commonwealth,  I was introduced to cousins, aunts and uncles, of every degree.  The way I knew that they were his relatives is that their relationship preceded them: everyone was called Aunt Leticia Baldridge, or Cousin Buthorpington.  Most of them had names of such old stock that John Smith himself would have felt like an upstart newcomer, so it was interesting for me when they found out I was from Texas.  One Aunt--Hezbollah Jane, or whatever her name might have been--actually looked at me over her pince-nez and said, upon learning my state of origin, "Oh, I'm sorry."  Veddy, veddy sorry, I'm sure.

The great majority of the twice, thrice or octoply removed cousins that I encountered were lovely people, but the sheer number of them boggled a person who then had only five first cousins on the planet.  I have more now, but that's a different story, longer than I care to go into right now. Point here is, the idea of a greatly extended family who valued its connectedness to the point of nomenclature, was not only phenomenal, but inspirational. I wanted cousins like that--hordes of kind, interesting people to see on holidays and lesser occasions, to drink tea and juleps with, or perhaps correspond with on Crane's paper about literary ideas or Kilimanjaro trips. There would be trust, openness, and great inspiration. Every day would be lived at the pinnacle of Mazlow's pyramid.

My first real inroads into expanding my circle of trust came when I married the youngest child of a family of eight siblings.  Can't you see the relative clicks adding up?  In laws, outlaws, nieces, nephews, a bounty of riches in the connectedness department.  None of us call each other "Cousin," but that's ok.  It is the 21st century now. Holiday activity increased tenfold, and creativity abounds in my extended family.

But even with all those wonderful people added to my life, I still felt the need for another kind of connectedness.  My current nuclear family started looking for other like-minded families to hang out with on Friday nights, fish with, and such. We have a family of friends here in Houston that we call "the Country Cousins."  They are not related to us, but we love them like they were. All of our children are mildly confused by it. "Are we related?" they ask, and all the grown ups resoundingly  answer, "Yes!" One day they'll understand: love is thicker than water, thicker than beer.

Recently, I have been reminded of the camaraderie of shared work. Spending time creating books with people forms a wonderful kinship, a bond that is somewhat like a family thing, as we go through good times and tough ones together, always with the green-light optimism that more good times are ahead. And I have  found another line of connectedness among these individuals--something that doesn't transcend these primary relationships but augments them like Oxiclean does Tide. It is the Katherine Center Effect, and it flows back and forth between my personal and professional lives like some kind of powerful primordial soup, creating new relationships, strengthening old ones, and enhancing connectedness wherever it flows.

Everyone I encounter these days--everyone to whom I am inexplicable drawn to befriend, or to write a contract for their book, or just to drink coffee with--is linked to Katherine like a Virginia cousin, usually only once or twice removed. Well, you may think, that is logical, because you are a book editor and she is a famous book writer, and you both live in Houston, which is not a book town. And that's where you would be wrong.  On several levels, the first being that Houston is as conducive to the propagation of the book arts as anyplace. Salt Lake City? St. Paul? Oxford, Mississipi? Exeter, New Hampshire? What did those towns have in a meaningful hard-cover way besides a few inspired individuals?

So, here's how it struck me that Katherine is at the center of a web of book people in Houston, a gracious Miss Spider, encouraging other writers and editors to come for tea rather than to become lunch. First, I realized:

1.  Katherine introduced me to Laura Mayes, a kirtsy.com founder and general wizardress, who first became our author and more recently our colleague.
2.  Katherine grew up on the same street as Angela Caughlin, the author of Journaling Through: Unleashing the Power of Your Authentic Self, which we will publish this fall.
3.  Katherine invited me to lunch one day where I got to sit with Karen Walrond, who has since become our author as she pens and shoots The Beauty of Different.
4.  Katherine is connected to the Bright Sky editors: her talented sister is recently responsible for Oobleck, Slime, and Dancing Spaghetti, and her former carpool mate not only edited Angela Caughlin's books, but also The Mother-In Law Manual.
5.  Katherine told Beth Irvine about Bright Sky, leading to a ripple effect of  signs that made it  possible for us to sign Beth up for three exciting books.
6.  Katherine is a graduate of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, making her, in my book, first cousins with a huge number of the amazing authors in town.

Six first degree relationships, and I will not bore you with all they myriad  once-removeds.  But, even recognizing these connections, I had never thought about the incredible enzymatic role my talented friend was playing in Houston until this Friday.

I went to a workshop at Joy Yoga, on Washington Avenue, down the street from  my favorite pizza place. It was lead by Angela Caughlin and Beth Irvine (who also know each other, go figure). It was about combining yoga and guided journaling to go deeper with intention.

I come rushing in, late from busyness and stress, and I hit peace like a wall.  After I smacked into it, I slid into a river of mental and physical submission and let these two powerful ladies have their way with my consciousness and my piriformis as I floated through the next couple of hours.  Only when I reemerged, focused, calm, and content on the other side, did I notice that Karen Walrond was in the workshop, too.  Wow, I thought, Look at all these wonderful women, together.  And the realization spread like a double rainbow in the mountains: They are all Bright Sky authors. That's when it struck me like a bolt that before we connected under Bright Sky, we were connected through Katherine.

So, perhaps she is some sort of literary fairy godmother--a sane Auntie Mame, a well-grounded Durrell, a rosy-cheeked Mrs. Wilcox or even  a kinder, soberer Dorothy Parker--inviting us to lunch, waving her wand over us, opening our eyes to the marvelous potential in one another. In any case, even though her copyright pages pledge her to another, Katherine is an integral part of the Bright Sky family. Love is thicker than imprints, too.

How many more wonderful connections are out there, waiting to be discovered in this creative frontier of a book town? And how many lead back to Cousin Katherine?

We'll just have to stay centered to find out.

It is something-it can be everything-to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below.
~Wallace Stegner

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At Study Butte, with its merest suggestion of human enterprise – motel, gas station, café, all pretty much the same building – we turned west on a much smaller road. The terrain got angry, or maybe just tortured, and I began to wonder if even my four-wheel drive would be drive enough.
There was dust piled along the side of the road, with a strong wind blowing through the canyons that didn’t want to leave it there.
    “Terlingua,” Jud said.
    For those chili cook-offs the first Saturday in November, I’d read, 20,000 or more gathered around this non-town of a town, sleeping at night mostly in their cars or on the ground beside their Harleys. The place was Key West without any water, with each rusty old Airstream doing its best to look permanent with a fence or a lean-to – all things, by the look of them, constructed from leftovers to support the intrepid pursuit of beer.
    We pulled off the curvy road at one especially sand-blown patch, drawn in by the sight of seven would-be cowpokes with salt-and-pepper ponytails sipping from mugs around a stone pit. The fire had burnt down on the way to out, but the day was turning hot anyway. Flannel jackets and overshirts had been shed by the cowboys, lying in heaps like modern art all over the dry ground.
    “You’re kinda late for coffee,” offered the solid blonde woman who came out of the bright pink trailer. “But you’re kinda early for barbecue.” She made as to slap her forehead as the three of us stood facing each other. “My, where have all my manners gone? I’m Kathy the Kosmic Kowgirl.”

From Marfa Shadows, A Chef Brett Mystery by John DeMers

My mother was an interior decorator, when she felt like it.  She had an eye for space, color, and good design. The best advice she ever gave me in terms of my own interiors was if you stick with what you really like, it will all go together.  How interesting that her good advice holds true for publishing as well.

I have often said that publishing creates connection. Sometimes those connections are obvious and intentional, and other times they are joyfully serendipitous.

The excerpt above is from a gourmet noir mystery Bright Sky is publishing in the Spring of 2010.  John has written several dozen non-fiction books, plays and musicals and is well-known as a food critic around town. This is his fiction debut, and it connects everything he knows about great food with everything he has ever vicariously experienced as he read the novels of his mystery writer hero, Robert Parker.  And it adds that certain Lone Star junusekwa. I can't wait for it to be a book.

John's manuscript introduced me to Kathy the Kosmic Kowgirl.  Never having been to Terlingua--my cheeks redden as I write-- I thought he had made her up. And I thought she was a really good character.

Enter Mike Marvins.  In the fall, we are publishing a gorgeous collection of his Big Bend photographs in a book called Texas' Big Bend: A Photographic Adventure from the Pecos to the Rio Grande.  It's the first book to include every part of that mythic region.

Mike and I start talking about Marfa and Marathon and Alpine and eventually we get toTerlingua. Then he starts talking about Kathy the Kosmic Kowgirl. How does he know about her, I think.  John made her up. Well, eventually both authors set me straight, Mike sent me the rosy image above, and I realized that old saws become old saws by being true: truth is stranger than fiction.

While my radar is tuned to look for connection, I hadn't thought about the armchair of our mystery novel coordinating so well with the chaise longue of our photographic essay. But, just like mama always said, by acquiring what we like, it just goes together.  It's the new Art Library style, and I'm sure it will be vaunted by all the shelter mags next season.

I think I'll cover everything in a smashing pink silk and get an ottoman with fine passamenterie to complete the vignette. Trays chick, as we say in Texas.

To conform within rational limits to a given style is no more servile than to pay one's taxes or to write according to the rule of grammar.
~Elsie de Wolfe


 

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 When I was a little girl, Valentine’s Day was about LOVE.  It wasn’t just the amorous kind, although there was plenty of that in the fourth grade hallways, it was about all those kinds of loves defined by the Greek words: eros, agape, Philadelphia, olive-you, words I learned around campfires in the summertimes in North Carolina and whose definitions I now need to google for clarity.

Back then, the words on the conversation hearts and the corn ball slogans on the printed paper valentines we glued messily onto doilies were about telling people how great they were, telling people how much we cared.  Sometimes it was a stretch to let someone know—if we weren’t quite sure of the reciprocity of their feelings--but usually it was a natural: Valentine, You Bowl Me Over.

In the mas-o-menos thrity years since fourth grade, the world has gotten a little more complicated...OK, a lot.  Fourteen year-old-boys can be fathers, eleven-year-olds girls dress like hot mamas, and elementary school carpool discussion revolves around America’s Next Top Model. Valentine’s Day is all too much chocolate and black lace with a back beat of desire—a relentless tune that proclaims what matters most is being a hot tamale. But as the wise C.S. Lewis shows in The Four Loves, letting love be driven purely by passion and our own desires gets us into a heap of trouble.

As the world rapidly rhumbas to the rhythm of this pre-packaged sensuality on steroids, we can sit that dance out and wait for a song that speaks to our hearts.   Love is a verb; we can choose how we do it.  Skip the pumped up expectation of champagne and romance, and consider alternative valentines. There’s a Joe Ely song about St.Valentine. Joe’s Saint drives a red Continental, with a headlight out and a dent in its side.  There’s a different take on true love. No doves, no roses. Picture him cruising the shopping mall, listening to the blues.  Love takes many forms, and everybody’s talking about it this time of year. But as we say in Texas, talkin’ ain’t doin.' Or, as they translate in California, talking the talk isn’t walking the walk.

Here’s a Valentine’s Day thought that takes me back to evenings around the campfire, holding hands with little girls in a completely agape way, learning about unselfishness and love under the pine trees.  It’s called Open Hands, and it is a collection of stories by Jana Mullins, a lovely lady who has spent many years sharing her gifts with others, walking and talking.

Everybody has a different reason to write a book: some people have a story inside them that longs to be told, others feel that spinning tales is like breathing air.  Still others have a great collection of recipes, or adventure tales, or business advice that friends beg them to share.  But Jana wrote her book to say thank you for some real love that was shared with her.

When she was a young woman, she wanted to go to graduate school, but she wasn’t in a financial position to do that.  A generous friend offered to pay.  Jana resisted—bootstraps, pride, not wanting to take advantage, you name it.  Finally she opened herself to the concept that the flip side of being  generous is being willing to receive generosity.  She took that gift horse by the mane, and hopped on.  As she watched her life become changed by what she learned in graduate school, she realized it was even more changed by the circles of giving and receiving that she saw all around her.
 
She collected some of the most wonderful stories that she encountered and put them together in one volume so they could share their transformative power with others.  But she didn’t stop there.  Her stories were so moving that she got them produced pro bono (there’s another great foreign term).  Now they are being published nationally, and she is giving all her profits back to charitable organizations.  And for those of you not intimately familiar with the publishing world, that is hard work, an act of love far beyond a dozen American Beauties. But Jana doesn’t care, because she is giving back, and the circle is unbroken.

So whether you drive a red Continental or a custom one, a Smart Car or a hawg, I hope your Valentine’s Day is about real love, and I hope you are open to receiving it where ever you find it.  And to the producers of ANTM, the marketing executives at Victoria’s Secret and everyone at Godiva’s parent company (have you gotten the chicken noodle-filled chocolate yet?): bless your little corporate hearts. Whoever you are, I hope you have a Happy Valentine’s Day, too.

Because as Jana and her collected friends have show us, the world works best when we are willing to put in a little more love.
 

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Quick: What do Yao Ming, Winston Churchill and Jaclyn Smith all have in common?  Three guesses probably won’t suffice, so let’s cut to the chase.  Two summers ago I edited a book about a boy with cerebral palsy.  It is called Window Boy, and it is connecting not only these diverse and notable figures (Jaclyn probably more of a figure than the other gentlemen, although Yao has a pretty striking silhouette) but other notables also.  In fact, Window Boy is getting downright  Kevin Bacon-y.

If you plant good seeds in your life, good things grow.  The interesting thing is that they don’t always grow where you plant them. Window Boy is more like an aspen tree, sending out beautiful runners in every direction. Window Boy tells the story of Sam Davis, a fictional boy in 1968 who should be in sixth grade but has never been allowed to go to school.  Sam watches boys playing basketball out his window, and he longs to be like them. The lady who cleans his house reads to him about Winston Churchill, and Sam learns so much about him that Winnie comes to life in his head and starts encouraging him to go after his dreams of going to school like a regular boy and being involved in the basketball team. Yao, that tall Rocket, read Sam’s story. Now he’s donating copies of Window Boy to children in China who have suffered from the earthquake. Churchill’s message “Never surrender” resonates in many circumstances. Connect Yao.

But Jaclyn Smith?  It turns out that Joanne Herring, recently made re-famous by the movie Charlie Wilson’s War in which she was played by the lovely Julia Roberts, thinks Window Boy would make a great movie.  And, she thinks Jacklyn Smith would make a great mother for Sam. It’s perfect. But where has that angel gotten herself these days? Connect Jacklyn.

Window Boy is all about connection.  The story came about because the author, Andrea White, connected to Houston’s Mayor Bill White by marriage, has a son who loves basketball (like Sam, like Yao).  Andrea wanted to write about Winston Churchill so Middle Schoolers could learn how a stunningly poor student and unloved son could become the most powerful man in the world.  These elements—basketball and Churchill, both rather round-- bounced around in her brain until one Sunday when she was relaxing at home. Her husband was reading the book she wanted to read, so she snuggled in with the New York Times magazine until she could get her hands back on the book.  She read an article by Lisa Belkin about a little boy who had cerebral palsy and was in a mainstream kindergarten class.  Suddenly, this little boy brought Winnie and basketball together in Andrea’s fertile imagination. Connect Lisa Belkin, Winston Churchill and Bill White.

Since Andrea created Sam, she has made connections with other children who are like him, and they are out making connections of their own.  Andrea met a boy named Gary Lynn who also has cerebral palsy.  She met him through the Rockets.  Turns out that much like Sam, he is an avid sports fan.  As a highschooler, he has already chaired a celebrity golf tournament to raise money for cerebral palsy.  When his mother read Andrea’s story about Sam, she said it could have been written about Gary. Connect a real boy, who is out there being an advocate.

Literacy Advance honored Andrea as a Champion of Literacy, and they made the connection with Winston Churchill’s great grandson, Jonathan Sandys.  Jonathan, who looks a good bit like his sainted great grand, thinks that Window Boy gives the most accurate portrait of Churchill’s character that he has ever run across.  And since he runs Churchill’s Britian, an organization dedicated to keeping the memory of Churchill alive, he knows a good bit about the old chap. Jonathan had such fun in Houston, he’s relocated here.  He threw a birthday bash for his great grandfather in December at Downing Street. Connect an ex-pat Brit and a cigar bar.

Another brilliant young person who also happens to have cerebral palsy appeared on the scene in Houston. Jemma Leach won a poetry contest, and her poem was lovely.  She and Andrea were all set to be honored at a luncheon to raise money for the River, an arts organization that makes art experiences accessible to children who for a variety of reasons—physical conditions, economic conditions—might not be able to experience the wonders of creativity—and its ability to bring us out of our caves and into the sunlight together. Ike put the ki-bosh on the luncheon, but the connection was made.

Sam Davis, the window boy, is out there. Born of connection, he’s making new connections. And every time a new link is forged, we realize that, as Brene Brown says, “there is no us and them.  There is only us.”  Sam Davis, Yao Ming, Jacklyn Smith, Lisa Belkin, Gary Lynn, Joanne Herring, Andrea White, Jemma Leach, Jonathan Sandys, you and me and Kevin Bacon. Strange bedfellows. As the seeds of understanding planted by one middle school book’s inspiration blossom all around us, we’re shaving off the degrees of separation.

Only connect.
 

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