lorna schultz nicholson – Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch

The Ontario Library Association’s annual Superconference is one of my favourite places to be! It’s an opportunity to meet up with my fellow authors in the flesh. We see each other a lot, but it’s usually virtually! It’s also of course fantastic to chat with librarians and teacher-librarians. No one supports books and authors more than librarians and educators.

Also, it’s just so utterly fun to walk around the tradeshow and snap pics of my friends. Authors are invariably by nature introverted so we all do what we can to promote each other. Take a look at all the friends I ran into just in half a day! I actually ran into more than this, but couldn’t always take pics.

Thanks, Lorna Schultz Nicholson for taking this pic!

It was lovely to meet this teacher-librarian whose heritage is Polish-Ukrainian!

Sylvia McNicoll’s book won the Hamilton Literary Award this year!!! I’m holding my late friend, Sheryl Azzam’s book, which was a finalist for the William C. Morris Award.

This is Mary Macchuisi, president of Pembroke Publishing. We have now known each other for 3 decades. She gave me a kind and helpful rejection when I was prepublished back in the 1990s, and I showed her letter during presentations. We seem to encounter each other once a year!

With Sylvia, Jean E Pendziwol and Ali McDonald! Jean E gave the opening keynote at CANSCAIP’s PYI, which was a bookend to my closing keynote! I first met Ali when she presented at our Brantford Book Camp about 19 years ago! We’ve corresponded ever since!

It was an honour and an angst to be asked to give the final keynote at this year’s Packaging Your Imagination Conference. I attended my first PYI way back in 1993 and it inspired and focused me to such an extent that I was able to revise and submit several children’s book manuscripts I had on the go, and within months, I had a yes for my first picture book, Silver Threads.

The final keynote is a memorial lecture, honouring Claire Mackay, who was a founding member of CANSCAIP, a force to be reckoned with (in a very good way) — and she was funny, brilliant and kind. The Peter and Eleanor Daniels Foundation sponsors this award. Here’s a pic with Elly Daniels, a woman who does tremendous things in support of arts in Canada.

My talk was very well received. The audience gave me a standing ovation. Many hugs and tears followed.

I sat in on fantastic and inspiring speakers all day long, which probably wasn’t the best way to prepare for doing a keynote, but heck, how could I not? It was a stellar lineup.