Into the Woods

LA's a heckuva town, but sometimes the endless miles of strip malls and roving hordes of paparazzi get you down. In such times, the only thing to do is to call up some friends and light out for the territories, Huck-style, and spend a little time halfway up a mountain where the air is thin and the trees are the size of skyscrapers.

That said, our trip to the woods was, at times, predictably literary. Mary spent her down time in between hiking and cooking mountain pies nose-deep in Dorothy Allison's Cavedweller, and my head lamp spent most of its time illuminating Dashiell Hammett short stories (instead of the dense French social theory I had vowed to revisit while we were there).

And then there was the campfire brainstorming session in which we and our co-woodspersons came up with perhaps the greatest children's literary franchise since Harry Potter. It is, in fact, so groovy that I am unwilling to describe it on a website, lest some nogoodnik steal our awesome.

So until then I'll leave y'all with the following photo of our blogmistress swaggering through the woods, confident in the knowledge that librarians rock and that we'll soon be swimming in the profits from the tote bags, action figures, and coloring books that will no doubt be pouring into our bank accounts as soon as Scholastic gets on board with our granola-fueled kid-lit shenanigans.