Thursday, September 16, 2010

New Orleans, new experience

Many authors are months if not years ahead of me on this, but my first Skype session with young readers was 9/11/10.

I’d set up Google Alerts for my name (with both a “c” and a “k”) and the titles of some of my books. (They should have a separate category for Google Narcissist.)
Through this, I learned that the St. Parish Tammany Library, Mandeville branch, across the lake from New Orleans, had chosen Boys of Steel: The Creators of Superman for its book club.


So impulsively, I called them.

The librarian was pleasantly surprised to hear from an author like that. We decided I’d call in for the last few minutes of their discussion of the book and answer a question from each of them. This, naturally, mutated into a Skype session.

I don’t want to make it into more than it was, but I was touched at the confluence of this simple little exchange. It wasn’t just that my first Skype session was with kids in New Orleans a few weeks after the fifth anniversary of Katrina (and precisely on the ninth anniversary of the New York and Washington terrorist attacks). It was that the topic was Superman.

How often during both tragedies did someone look up and wish privately or even aloud that he was real?

2 comments:

Todd Rutherford said...

Reading about your experience gave me chills. Modern technology has equipped authors with exciting new ways to reach out to readers.

Marc Tyler Nobleman said...

Thanks for writing, Todd. Yes, more children than ever before will now get to "meet" authors. That can only be good for us all!