A Celebration of Imagination

One day. Two "Adams." Four sessions. 

Recently, boys in all grades got the inside scoop on writing and illustrating books when they were visited by notable published authors Adam Auerbach and Adam Gidwitz.

Mr. Auerbach, author and illustrator of The Three Vikings, Legendary Creatures: Mythical Beasts and Spirits From Around the World, Monkey Brother, and the Ezra Jack Keats Honor book Edda: A Little Valkyrie’s First Day of School met with the Lower School boys. While reading aloud The Three Vikings to boys in Grades K through One, he transported them through a "mythical tale that celebrates teamwork, acceptance, the power of music, and the art of storytelling." 

He also led the boys in drawing an original character, an amalgam of diverse animals generated by the boys' imaginations, and shared the long journey a book takes through writing, editing, illustrating, and production. One third grader noted he was particularly "impressed to learn about the multiple rewrites and re-drawings during the writing and illustrating process."

Upper School boys were visited by the dynamic Adam Gidwitz, author of the Unicorn Rescue and Grimm series of fairy tale "re-tells."  Mr. Gidwitz captivated the boys with one of his reworked fairy tales - The Iron Shoes, about a boy whose father thinks he will amount to nothing, and how he struggles through haunted castles and his own mistakes to amount to something great indeed. 

Mr. Gidwitz had the following advice for boys who want to be a published author: "Spend as much time as you can imagining. If you want big arm muscles, you do push-ups. If you want a brain capable of holding whole imaginary worlds and long narratives all at once, the best exercise you can do is imagining. Reading is a form of imagining. Video games, isn’t. Playing with toys is. Even playing solo on a basketball court, talking to yourself, is. That’s how I prepared to become an author. By nurturing a rich imaginative world." 

The boys were riveted by Gidwtiz's presentation. One eighth grader especially appreciated Mr. Gidwitz's personal journey: "Mr. Gidwitz gave a lot of background about how he became an author. It didn't feel scripted, and that was nice." For his part, Mr. Gidwitz was impressed with how our boys "were eager to learn, to laugh, to get emotional—and to talk to me after about their experience of my talk. Consequently, it was a joy to talk to them."

All boys received complimentary books and Upper School boys had the opportunity to have their books autographed by Mr. Gidwitz. 

Highly interactive and thoroughly engaging, these sessions were sponsored by the school's PA Author Series Committee led by Susan Austin and Caroline Shook and were made possible through the support and leadership of our Librarians, Winnie Feng and Gretchen King. Each year, the series provides our boys with the opportunity to learn from and interact with a published author, thereby gaining insights into the challenges and rewards of writing and illustrating books. All, while celebrating the power of imagination.