I put in a proposal to present at next spring’s Public Library Association Conference with three of my closest professional colleagues (who are obviously also good friends): Drea, Katie, and Angie. You may remember that the three of us presented together at the YA Lit Symposium last fall in St. Louis, so we know we work well together and when we get talking about library-related stuff, we love to talk about it out loud and with others.

We waited patiently — and maybe impatiently — to hear back. And today we heard that our proposal was accepted.

So you’ll be able to hear us talk in Indianapolis on a panel we called “Beyond Duct Tape Wallets: Offering Dynamic, Effective, and Community-centered Teen Programs.” It’s not specifically about books or reader’s advisory, though I certainly plan on talking about both in terms of programming and reaching your community’s teens.

And maybe best of all is that I plan on talking a lot about this summer and what I learned about teen programming. Sure, I’ve been doing some form of teen programming now for four years, but I still learn something new. This year I learned how much failure you can have trying new things and when you go back to super basic stuff, sometimes you can have great success. 

Also, expect some passive programming talk.

What maybe excites me most about this is not that I get to talk and share with these three librarians who constantly inspire and motivate and cheerlead me, but I get to listen to two other very close librarian friends and colleagues as they talk about tween programming at the library. No, I won’t tell you who just yet because they get to make that announcement themselves.

I haven’t talked much on STACKED about what a challenging summer this has been professionally for me, but it has been. Today, though, between this and working some things out with myself mentally with the ending of our summer library club, I’m feeling almost refreshed and excited again about what I do (I always like it a lot — I love it, in fact — but it is easy to wear yourself out on the things you love).

I hope I get to see some of you next spring in Indianapolis!