Yesterday, Tavia kindly wrote me a note telling me she’s been selected by Blackstone Audio to narrate the audiobook of The Heroine’s Bookshelf. I immediately went to Google and found out that Tavia is not only an Audie nominee, Library Journal Top Audiobook winner, and Earphones winner, but that she brings some serious intention, purpose, and skill to her craft.  The thought of someone I’ve never met speaking in my words in a studio all the way across the country is slightly surreal…and I’m so excited to hear the results.

Ever since then, I’ve been thinking about another set of conversations I started having when I arrived at Smith College as a confused seventeen-year-old ready to take on the world.  Inevitably, I’d feel uncomfortable as I started to converse with young women whose backgrounds and socioeconomic histories couldn’t have been more different than mine…until heroine magic happened and we were talking like old friends about The Babysitters Club or A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or Jane Eyre.

And it occurred to me:  in a way, heroines are glue.  They bind together different generations that can find common ground in the pages of timeless books.  They connect people of wildly different backgrounds, ethnicities, and daily lives in a shared and common experience that is interpreted through a million different lenses.  They’ve allowed me to reach a lifelong dream (publishing my first book), and they’ve also formed the foundation of what I know will be lifelong friendships and connections as I move into an ever-widening world of fandom, readalongs, book blogs, conferences, and conversations.

Here are a few current and upcoming events that will feature heroines as glue…and that I’m super excited to share with all of you.

• ~ BronteAlong:  This awesome initiative is the brainchild of Melissa Averinos and Beth Dunn, two kindred spirits and the founders of Eggplantia, in order to bring together lovers of all things Brontë.  I’ve heard rumors of an AustenAlong and maybe even (eeee) an AlcottAlong rearing their literary heads in the future, and meanwhile I’m so enjoying people’s insightful posts, tweets, and musings about what makes Brontë books so very compelling and special, almost 200 years later.
• ~ LauraPalooza 2010:  I can’t even express how insanely excited my childhood self and my adult one are about participating in the first-ever multi-day academic conference/fan convergence surrounding Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House on the Prairie books.  The fact that going with my mom after a semi-epic roadtrip makes it even more awesome and thrilling and terrifying…I’ll also be presenting a panel with Wendy McClure and Sandra Hume that I’m all fired up about.  My people!  The people who wore bonnets as children!
• ~ Dewey’s Read-a-Thon:  This event is just cool.  For 24 hours on April 10, readers and book bloggers everywhere will challenge themselves to read for one day straight, blog about it, and participate in mini-challenges.  This event has grown to twice a year and I’m so looking forward to this April’s results!
• ~ The Classics Circuit:  This blog has been arranging blog tours for famous authors…with a leetle twist.  They’re all classic authors (i.e. dead).  Heyer.  Wharton.  This is as good as it gets!

So tell me…what heroines bind you to other people?  And what upcoming literary events are exciting you these days?

It will be translated and published by Minumin at some point (I’m thinking in 2010) and I’ll have the pleasure of seeing my book in an alphabet and language I have no hope of ever understanding!  Naturally, I am over the moon…and very grateful to the fabulous and hard-working people at HarperCollins who made the sale.

There’s still time to enter the Lorelei King Audiobook Giveaway…in fact, I’d like to beg you to do so!  Details below:

Lorelei King Tallgrass Contest

To celebrate my recent interview with audiobook superstar Lorelei King and to give readers access to a great heroine book, I’m giving away one copy of Lorelei’s Audy and Audiophile Award-winning reading of Sandra Dallas’s Tallgrass, a poignant story of the Japanese-American internment of the 1940s as told through the eyes of a young girl.  Here’s how to enter:  click here and leave a comment on this blog post telling who you’d have voice your favorite heroine (voice actress, actress, friend, mom…just make sure to identify her!) and why.  Comment with a link to your tweet, blog post, or Facebook “share with friends” about the contest and I’ll enter you twice! I’ll choose the winner at random at close of business this Friday, April 2.  Contest is open to United States, Canadian, and U.K. residents only.  Good luck!

Here’s the deal report from PM *beam*:

March 5, 2010:  Audio rights
Erin Blakemore’s THE HEROINE’S BOOKSHELF, a look at literature’s greatest and most enduring female characters — such as Jo March, Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Bennet, Laura Ingalls and others — and their authors, who have helped shape the inner lives of generations of women, teasing out universal tenets of strength, wisdom, and survival, to Blackstone Audio, for publication in November 2010, by Janice Suguitan at Harper.