Hari Tiwari and Terry photo by Deb Cram
Here’s a photo gallery from our Folktale Festival celebrating The Story of a Pumpkin by Hari Tiwari. She told the story in her ELL class in Laconia, New Hampshire. It was a story her father told to her when she was a little girl. And now the New Hampshire Humanities Council has published the tale in Nepali and English with the help of the READ MORE
“Braiding the Verse Novel” is a series of interviews I did with writers of novels – and one biography – in verse. We had our conversations over the summer of 2012. I’ve written articles about verse novels for School Library Journal and NH Writer which draw on these conversations in different ways. Here, I’m posting the full responses from each of the writers who allowed me to ask them questions. Nearly everyone who has read my novel, The Good Braider, asked me why I wrote in the spare lines of verse. My readers’ questions have caused me to explore my own craft and then to explore the question with these articulate, generous writers. Each week I will feature a new novelist.
Edide’s War by Carol Fisher Saller is a novel in poems. Each of Carol’s poems could stand alone as a character portrait or vignette. “A poignant look at boyhood before and during the long years of World War II,” writes Kirkus in a starred review.
The Story of a Pumpkin, a folktale in Nepali and English, has just been published by the New Hampshire Humanities Council. The photo is from our Folktale Festival celebrating the tale told by Hari Tiwari who now lives in Laconia, NH. This book is the fruit of the work of many: new 
neighbors from Bhutan, folklorist Jo Radner, artist Susan Gaylord, and me, in my job as literacy director at the NH Humanities Council. The story was told to us by Hari Tiwari whose father told her the tale when she was a small girl in Bhutan. You can read about the steps we took, from collecting folktales in ESOL classes to proofreading in Nepali and English. The book is distributed by the University Press of New England. Soon we will have a teacher’s guide.
By Terry Farish
“Like I want to rush my sentence. I feel like I’m missing out with my baby. But it seems like six months has gone so fast for her. You want to take in every last breath you can take, and make them last.”
Inmates connect with their kids reading poetry and Jane Yolen’s Owl Moon. READ MORE
photo by Kate Philbrick
“When Studs Terkel was asked on Transom what he wanted to hear on the radio, he answered, “Something real.” Jay Allison in his intro to this story on Transom.org, “If You Were Thomas’s White Girlfriend.”
By Terry Farish
Thomas got a job shelving books at a branch of the Portland Public Library, a pretty good job considering that he hadn’t been in the country all that long.
