When I stood in front of the crowd of well-wishers who’d gathered together at Red Balloon Bookshop in St. Paul on August 26th to celebrate the launch of The Secrets of Eastcliff-by-the-Sea, I felt for a few dazed moments as if I’d been suspended inside my own story, on stage in the ballroom of Eastcliff-by-the-Sea, feeling like Great-Grandmama Easterling must have felt as her tear-filled eyes traveled across a sea of smiling sock monkey faces.
Close friends and family members would have been shocked if I had broken spontaneously into song – I don’t normally do that – but I almost did. At that moment, the lyrics of Something Good, from the 1965 film musical The Sound of Music came to mind:
For here you are, standing there, loving me
Whether or not you should
So somewhere in my youth or childhood
I must have done something good.
People from all walks of life were in the audience: my immediate family; our close friends; colleagues from the Roseville, West St. Paul, Saint Anthony-New Brighton and Anoka-Hennepin school districts; members of Holy Cross Lutheran Church; a woman whom I hadn’t seen since we lived in Elizabeth Waters dormitory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the late 1960’s; teachers and authors that I worked with in the MFA program at Hamline University; children’s writers from a large circle of those who’ve participated in Jane Resh Thomas’s writer’s workshops; a few folks like Henry and his mother who I met for the first time that night. 
Weeks later, the memories of their faces are like shiny pieces of glass in a mosaic of my life’s best moments.
The creative members of the Red Balloon staff – Amy, Kate, Joan, and Matt – worked together to make this joy-filled evening even more special.
In the seven years since the story about a sock monkey named Throckmorton first sparked my imagination, I have often felt like Tango, our 11-year-old, 8-pound Yorkshire terrier. I’m always amazed by how fast his six-inch legs must move, and how many steps his tiny feet must take, in order to complete our daily mile-long walk. Writing The Secrets of Eastcliff-by-the-Sea, I often felt like a very little dog with very short legs on a very long walk. 
Now it’s time to let my readers complete that journey.
Children’s author Katherine Paterson, in her Newberry Medal Acceptance Speech in 1981, expressed this feeling eloquently. Like her, I have tried to give my readers, “while they are young, the best, the truest story of which I am capable. I have learned, for all my failings and limitations, that when I am willing to give myself away in a book, readers will respond by giving themselves away as well, and the book that I labored over for so long becomes in our mutual giving something far richer and more powerful than I could have ever imagined.”
Indeed, now it’s time to unhand my story and let young readers slip into my open palm shiny pieces of truth from their own lives.
It’s time to take
something good
and make it better.