TD Book Week was a terrific, well-oiled machine of a tour. School after school, libraries, a children's museum, hundreds of faces: magically healing stuff. It's such a big deal to hear kids laugh at your stories, and shout at you in unison to give 'em anudder.

I've been chosen for TD Canadian Children's Book Week 2017, a national effort that brings Maritime authors and illustrators to the Yukon, Manitobans to Newfoundland, and Albertans to Nunavut for a dizzying week of workshops.

I'm thrilled to be presenting, reading, and signing books at this weekend's Word on the Street Festival in Halifax! Bring your little beasts to the festival's homebase of the Halifax Central Library this Saturday, September 17, 2016.

Let's raise every glass of green monster punch to Nimbus, Eric Orchard, Woozles, the Halifax Zombie Walk folks, and every other little goblin, robot, and alien who came out to the book launch at the Halifax Central Library to celebrate. Brains!

Four sessions of dozens of kids in one day. No matter where I am, it always starts off the same: What's the biggest library rule? ... BE QUIET they say, in that obedient sing-songy chorus. One kid in the back says NO FLYING SIDE KICKS.

Play with words. Have fun and someday, when you're running through a sprinkler or eating a hot dog or drifting off to sleep, you'll feel a tap on your shoulder, and a voice in your ear like it's being whispered through a tin can telephone. Be ready.

When you make space for art, you become a magnet for other people who make space for art. And people like that are weird and rare and fantastic. They throw wood onto our fires and they make the room warm. Oddity fuels oddity when everything else is beige.

I come to oil country with a book about radicals who wish for the end of pipelines. But that's not what it's about. It's the friction of prosperity and concern, ability and disability, well-placed outrage and courage. It's banjo song and smoke in your eye.

I fly into Edmonton and on from there to schools in Lethbridge and Stand Off—passing through with gifts for them and soaking it up, reading, stocking their library with Missy and airborne resistance.

Every night there were spoons, a fiddle, a snare drum, guitars, everyone piled and sprawled and feeling fat and thrilled and rich, looking at each other bleary-eyed and spinning, all of us teetering on the edge of sickness. Keep going.

I come home to here via planes that took off from Robson Street, the Distillery District, the Outer Banks. Now, Makkovik. Flight is still a miracle. That this house feels like it's got a wagging tail when I walk through the door is another. 

I wrote about a pirate ship and a secret clubhouse for spies, but I look grown-up. Except the babyface that got me kicked out of restricted movies until I was 26 now has the effect, a decade later, of people thinking sometimes I'm 26.