On April 11th, I attended the NYLA YSS conference in Melville Long Island. While there, we were treated to two wonderful presenters. In the morning, Alex Flinn talked about where she gets her ideas for her YA books. She told several stories about how her first book, Breathing Underwater, had shown teenage girls the warning signs of an abusive relationship. She has had many girls thank her for her novel, and how it saved them from abuse. Her books vary from believable fiction to retellings of classic fairytales such as Beauty and the Beast.
In the afternoon, Monica Wellington presented. She is an author and illustrator of picture books. She has a very unique style of forming her books. She first does the illustrations, making them perfect, and then she works on the story and text. She gave a slide show of how she gets her ideas, and the process she goes through from start to finish of a project.
I also attended three workshops. The first was on doing PR for youth services. I found the workshop to be more on how to get out of bad publicity then actually promoting events, but the information is still useful. We were told that we can be friendly with the press, but the press is never our friend. We should never say anything we do not want printed, even if it is “off the record.â€
The next workshop I attended was on programming for young adults. There were many creative ideas, such as battle of the bands. One of the people presenting even had a YA Café in their library, just for the teens to hang out it. There they host open mic nights a few times a month. Another suggestion was hosting Yu-Gi-Oh card games. Just providing a space for the kids to play was all that is needed. The final idea was starting a Manga book club. This would be especially great if you had a large Manga collection.
The last workshop of the day, and the most fun, was spring craft ideas. In this workshop there were four different stations set up for four different crafts. We were given 15 minutes at each station to complete the crafts. One that fit in really well with the summer reading theme was to fill an old water bottle with birdseed (the mixed variety works best) and then put five or six plastic bug with the seeds. After everything is inside, you put the cap back on the bottle, shake it up, and see if you can find the bugs.
The conference was a lot of fun. I love hearing authors talk about how they create there books, and where they get their ideas. The workshops were informative and interesting. And hanging out with hundreds of fellow librarians was great. I can not wait for next year.