Debra Frasier's Blog

This tiny book is the dummy (practice book) of my “newest” project (in quotes because I started it years ago and then life intervened.) But the lapse in time has focused my thinking and I am happily back at work in my new studio in Spruce Pine, NC, near the Penland School of Crafts, where I now live. Instead of explaining all the leaps in this paragraph, we are just going to jump right into TODAY, right now, this instant!

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Viktor Frankl

MEANING OF LIFE? Imagine: you are simply having a celebratory cup of coffee at your favorite coffee shop, making a list of what-to-do-on-the first day of a Post-Big-Project-Era when your parked car is suddenly blasted out of the shop parking lot with alien-ray-gun precision! So you spend the next nine days sorting through it—yet keep running across that handwritten list of “what-to-do,” written minutes before the crash. It is laughable, this living evidence of the pretense of con...

One author’s technique for bringing Dog Love into the heart of the classroom
By Debra Frasier, Author & Illustrator

Oddly, I came to understand more about first person narration when writing SPIKE, Ugliest Dog in the Universe because SPIKE was NOT first “person”—but was instead—”first dog.” In this story, Spike tells us some Big True Things about beauty being a matter of perspective: “Humans can be very ugly you know with those long swinging arms and no fur except on top”—and shows us that bein...

SPIKE in process in the studio

SPIKE, Ugliest Dog in the Universe releases to the world on Oct 1, 2013. It has been so long in coming that I find myself sleepless now that it is finally here. Often the hard part of a book’s arrival is the quiet that follows…the band does not march up my street, and the mayor does not deliver the keys to the city. Instead, it is the silent swish of the cover, lifting.

Still, after all these years of making books, I fall into the first finished book and then slow...

In Miami I packed away my down coat, traded bare oak branches for the tick, tick, tick of palm fronds, slipped on sandals and spoke to the entire school one day, then each individual grades in the remaining two days. We started the SPIKE FRIEND’S workshop, where students learn to write from a dog’s perspective in order to practice characterization through development of “voice.” I am just developing this workshop and I cannot wait to see/read/hear their results. I will report back when I’ve h...