Dear 826 Seattle Fans, I start this update on April 1st. It is snowing outside. I am wearing my coat as I sit here in the back office of 826 Seattle. At our staff meeting today we discussed spring colors for T-shirts and our spring fundraiser, which isn’t far off and whether we could hire our youth mentors for summer...all with the flakes drifting down. I’m afraid summer will come and it will still be snowing. Is it summer if it is snowing? I hope it stops. We don’t have money in the budget for heat in August, other than the natural kind. Speaking of summer workshops, Samar is working on them now and the list will be posted around the end of May. This summer we will be working on a book project with amazon.com and Daniel Handler (also known in some circles as Lemony Snicket). The details of this project to be revealed...do stay tuned! We suspect that one student who will join us this summer is seven-year-old Gabriel, a recent attendee at one of our field trips. As many of you know, we invite classroom teachers to visit us at 826 Seattle during the school day for what are rather lively group writing experiences. Here is a little feedback from Gabriel’s mother:
Answer: our Saturday workshops. They are free of charge, although to be honest, if parents feel inspired to give donations we are happy to receive them. We would be crazy not to.
Speaking of field trips, as part of the follow-up after a field trip we encourage teachers to have their students write letters to members of our team at Geoduck Publishing. One of my favorite things is to read these letters, which I find quite informative.        Moving right along: Justin has been putting a ton of energy into the store, including stocking some dynamite new products. Right when you think you own everything you need, we present you with:
Now, I don’t generally think of myself as wanting to spend $75 on a globe representing the stars. However, I was just on vacation in Texas and went to the MacDonald Observatory, which, for all you non-listeners of KPLU’s StarDate, is a renowned place for stargazing. Make no mistake, I’ve never considered myself an astronomer type. I was just there because it was down the road from Marfa, Texas, which has all the Donald Judd art stuff. I consider myself more an art type. But when I was lying on that bench at the MacDonald Observatory, out there in Texas at 9:00 at night, with over 800 other star-watchers during our “star party,” I found myself completely wowed by the starscape. Our guide, who was completely lost from sight somewhere in the darkness, spoke into his microphone and waved his trusty laser beam through the sky, announcing things like: “Hey, there’s the Hubble spacecraft,” and “Ancient Greeks called this constellation Aries which means ‘the ram.’” I loved how confident the guide was, pointing out stars with his laser beam and expecting us to believe that was a ram shape, and, not only that, throughout the history of time, folks have been looking up into the sky and saying things like, “Oh look, a ram.” I’m not buying it. However, in spite of this, it was unbelievably beautiful that night and I still felt the absolute certain undeniable magnetic pull of the stars and of space travel. I used to scoff at constellations but now I think they are simply an excuse to look up. “What do you mean, Orion’s belt? I don’t see any belt up there.” But one night in Texas I became a convert to constellation gazing. What does this have to do with my 826 Seattle April update? All this means is that I’m saving my money for the 12” celestial globe that lights up the constellations. It is $75 and worth every penny of it. I’m going to buy it, take it home, turn off the lights and relive my night at the MacDonald Observatory when I joined 898 complete strangers in lying on benches outdoors in the dark imagining star goats in the sky. And, while we’re on the topic, if you aren’t particularly a stargazing skeptic (like I used to be), you could save a lot of travel money (and time – have you ever driven across Texas?) by just forgetting the trip to the observatory and popping over to the Greenwood Space Travel Supply Co. and buying the globe. If this weather keeps up this could be your only opportunity to see stars for quite some time.
GOOD NEWS: We are trying out adding one more field-trip day to our weekly roster because there is so much demand. That would mean Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday mornings would find 826 Seattle full of children, their youthful selves brimming over with the excitement, as previously reported by the mother of Gabriel. Our after-school drop-in is jampacked. We are crazy happy to have so many kids around. Sometimes this place is so noisy, I will storm out of my (non)office to say something in a grouchy, grownup voice like: “Hey, everyone, get to work!” only to find that everyone is actually working. It’s amazing how productive young people can be while maintaining such a spirit of lively (aka: noisy) optimism. BAD NEWS: The aforementioned “brimming over with excitement” and “lively optimism” means that those of us who actually have quiet work to do (like write grants to fund the structure that supports the lively optimism) have a hard time successfully accomplishing our work. We have no private offices at 826 Seattle. So, it’s kind of ironic because the more we offer at our site, the harder it is to keep offering it. Right now our building is full of students Monday through Thursday afternoons and Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday mornings. That’s a heck of a lot of time not getting our work done efficiently or a lot of time at the Neptune or the Green Bean coffeehouses, or simply working from home. SOLUTION Find a space within a one-block radius that we can use for quiet work time. Yes, as you know, I often end my updates with an ask for things like staplers or wall clocks or software upgrades. For this update – April 2009 – I’m asking for a donation of office space in our neighborhood. We don’t need internet (although it would be nice), we don’t need telephones (we all have cell phones), we don’t need furniture (we’ll get our own for free). We just need quiet. The lighter side of the economic downturn is there might be a space available. We would be happy to inhabit a space with a “For Lease” sign on the door. We would be happy to act as cordial agents for the generous owner of such space who is letting us squat there free of charge while waiting for the perfect paying tenant. We would be the model tenants and in fact, would be so grateful for a space that we would gift the generous landlord his or her very own Celestial Globe as a token of our appreciation. Hence, while we are tightening our belts with the economic downturn by securing free space, our generous landlord can be embarking on the investigation of Orion’s belt...not to mention Aries (the ram) and Leo (the lion). And hence, in closing, we would all feel rather heavenly, in one way or another, with such an arrangement. We could accommodate more students in our space. We could peacefully write grants, which would help us accommodate more students. It would all be lovely. Stay tuned to see what an ask for free office space in a bimonthly newsletter can produce. I feel some skeptics in the crowd but since the beginning our time here at 826 Seattle we have been nothing but optimistic. Happy snowy spring, Teri |
