Cathleen Davitt Bell's Blog

Last week I participated in the New York City Teen Author Fest. Check out the illustration of a Reader's Theater event I was in at Barnes & Noble Union Square with David Levithan, Holly Black, Heather Demetrios, Kevin Emerson, Tanuja Hidier, Kathryn Holmes, and Scott Westerfeld.

We were sketched by a courtroom sketch artist. Who knew I had the Bell family nose?!
See sketching and read more here...

The NYC Teen Author Fest is a really fun, free, awesome, weeklong event. You should come!

And I'm very excited to be involved in the wackiest, most fun night of it Fri Mar-22, 7-8:30pm @ the Barnes & Noble in Union Square.

Something called...

Reader's Theater.

What's that? Funny you should ask.

It's bunch of writers writing out short scenes from our books as plays...and then acting them out.

In other words, in a city more than fully saturated with professional talent, this is an opportunity to see...something else!

Come on down. I will be channeling the part of myself that always ends up lip synching Meatloaf songs and line dancing at bar mitzvahs celebrations.

(I'll also be at the Mega Signing at Books of Wonder on Sunday March 22nd.)

See my full post about it on my blog.

I had the fun of returning to high school last night...not as Lucas did in my just-published young adult time travel romance I Remember You, but in a much more ordinary capacity, as a guest speaker at an induction ceremony to the Cum Laude Society at my high school, the Kingswood-Oxford School in West Hartford, CT (Wyverns Forever!).

My remarks took the form of an essay I'm calling "The Power of Your Developing Heart." I spoke about what it was like to be an apathetic teenager of the 1980s, and how studying Russian put me on the track to writing a book about memory and forgetting. Read the essay on CathleenDavittBell.com.

And here's a wonderful write-up of the evening on Head of School Dennis Bisgaard's blog.

Yesterday was the publication day for I Remember You!

To celebrate, I'm posting a picture of the family wearing the temporary tattoos my husband ordered

...see them here...

and quotes from some of my favorite blog reviews.

When I got to the final page, I just sobbed. ... I actually gasped and felt a little breathless…I just found myself thinking “wow, wow, wow.”

Such a Novel Idea I couldn't begin to figure out what I'd compare I Remember You to. It's so simple, yet so complicated, and sheer curiosity drives you

Couldn't be more excited to announce a few upcoming I Remember You appearances, online and off. Wednesday Feb 4th6-7:30 Teen Author Reading Night @Jefferson Market Branch/New York Public Library (corner of 6thAve and 10thSt) Very excited to be reading in this line up: Cathleen Bell, I Remember You Jen Calonita, Flunked Heather Demetrios, I’ll Meet You There Michelle Knudsen, Evil Librarian Suzanne Myers, Stone Cove Island Jill Santopolo, Love on the Lifts Catherine Stine, Dorianna Maryrose

A friend of my parents', an architect named David Handlin, decided to read 100 great American novels in his retirement. He wrote about the project and published a list of the books he read on The American Scholar, and talked about my dad in the introduction to his list. I loved how he ported his experience as an architect into his description of what he think makes for a good book. Here it is: In my professional life I am always thinking about quality. If that is true with architecture, why

Two things I'm thinking about this morning. 1) At my sister and brother-in-law's holiday party over the weekend, when they put an advance copy of I Remember Youout on display, two teenage girls immediately started to read it--standing up, eating canapés all the while. "I must get this," each one said. Very cheering, of course, but also made me wonder, What specific thing about the book drew them in? The picture on the cover? The voice on the first page? The promise that it was going to be a love

Yesterday, Rebecca Wallace-Segall, a marvelous writing teacher as well as founder of youth writing program Writopia Lab (and therefore my boss) asked me to contribute to an email sent to teen writers who had just finished their National Novel Writing Month challenge. I had the experience of reading two NaNoWriMo novels written by a wonderful cousin of mine at either end of approximately the last decade, and I definitely had something to say. Little did I know I'd be in company with Writopia

Came across this in a collection of poems I was reading because a reviewin a free newspaper stuffed under the door in my hotel room in Northern Ontario made me feel like I had to immediately get my hands on a copy of this collection. Which I did. And it's making me very happy. For Election Day, from Joshua Mehigan: The Polling Place Same place as four years ago. The people arrive tired by daytime. Nighttime is ten after five. The flag is lit, and the sculpture of who knows who. Here’s the fire

Okay, peeps, it’s pie sale time. You can tell it’s pie sale time because I’m saying things like “Okay peeps.” During the pie sale I morph into another version of myself. One who is peppy and cheerful and obsessive. Manic’s a reductive word, so I’m not goin g to use it, but I think you can see what I mean. (I promise this post is related to writing. I will get there. But it’s going to be long. I’d say sorry but no one reads this except my mom, and she loves long.) The pie sale is an annual event