Tuesday’s convention highlights include authors and more

A daily review of convention news from the staff of Reading Today

 Attendees at the IRA Annual Convention had a full slate of activities to choose from on Tuesday. Here are a few of the day’s highlights.

Alice Hoffman, best-selling author and screenwriter, took a warmly appreciative audience on a short tour into her mind and heart at the Second General Session on Tuesday. The keynote speaker said this year marks the 30th anniversary of the publication of her first novel, Property Of.

Each year, people flock to the Exhibit Hall to get autographs from popular authors such as Avi.

Hoffman shared stories of her childhood and writing heroes, and talked about the importance of books to a free society. Books allow readers to escape, help heal, and can form bonds, especially between parents and children when they read together, she said. Fairy tales have always fascinated her because they speak to an underlying psychology that binds our culture, but today many children don’t know them except in the Disney version, she said. Hoffman praised the role of teachers and mentors, and said their influence can be profoundly important. Her most recent young adult fiction is Incantation, a story about a young girl who lives during the Spanish Inquisition. Her latest adult novel is Skylight Confessions, and she is currently working on a new book, The Third Angel.

Attendees at the Young Adult Literature Luncheon received a special treat after dessert at the event. Anita Lobel, prizewinning author and illustrator of many children’s and young adult works, read from a draft of a sequel to her memoir of her childhood in war-torn Poland and her time in concentration camps. That book, No Pretty Pictures: A Child of War, was a National Book Award finalist.

Picking up where the earlier book ended, Lobel tells the story of her family’s ocean passage to America, a country she knows through film, song, and story. The audience listened intently as she told of her dreams, regrets, desires, and discontents—and finally of her family’s arrival in New York. Instead of joining their relatives who waited anxiously on the docks for them, they were detained at Ellis Island because she and her brother had suffered a bout of tuberculosis as young children.

Also at the luncheon in the Grand Ballroom of the Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel, the authors of IRA’s Children’s Book Awards were introduced and congratulated by Jill Lewis, a member of the IRA Board of Directors.

At a special featured session on Tuesday afternoon, author S.E. Hinton reflected on a career that spans 40 years from the publication of her classic book, The Outsiders, which was written when she was in high school and published during her first year of college. Hinton talked about the development of various books she has written and gave some insights into her writing process. One of the reasons she wrote The Outsiders, she said, was that “there was nothing realistic being written about teenage kids.” She noted, with some irony, that the year she was writing that book she got a D in creative writing at school.

Hinton said the short stories in her latest book, Some of Tim’s Stories, represent “the best writing I’ve ever done. Everything you write is practice for the next book.”

As of Tuesday morning, registration at this year’s IRA Annual Convention stood at approximately 12,300.