Apparently at the Texas PTA Leadership Conference in Austin.

Yup, I was surprised too.

I went to the conference to sign books at the Barnes and Noble booth but arrived early and had time to stroll the conference floor. I don’t know what I expected to find at such a convention, but what I discovered was booth after booth of vendors selling school fundraiser trinkets.

And what really caught my eye was the booth of the Texas Beef Council right there among them.

In addition to being a former vegetarian–after a decade, I gave it up at the sight of a filet mignon–I’m also an avid Oprah Winfrey fan who carefully tracked Oprah’s trial after she insulted the beef industry. So needless to say, I was intrigued.

Enter Stacy Bates, certified dietician and passionate beef eater. “What’s the connection between beef and the PTA?” I asked. Stacy told me that she was at the conference to encourage families to get back together at the dinner table and eat beef. “It’s good for our health,” she said. Then she told me there are 29 cuts of lean beef that have only one gram of fat more per serving than chicken.

“How often do you eat beef?” I wanted to know.

“Three times a day,” she said with a straight face.

I was astonished. “You eat beef three times a day?”

“Yes, I do.” Stacy smiled.

“Isn’t that unhealthy?”

“No,” Stacy told me. “It’s all about portion size. A portion is about the size of your palm. Not my palm,” she said. “Mine’s about five ounces.” She looked at my hands. “But yours. Yours are about three.”

Wow! I was really starting to like Stacy. The impact of being told I have three ounce palms by a smart and beautiful beef expert cannot be underestimated. But I was still doubting that Stacy ate beef for breakfast.

“Doesn’t that take a lot of planning?” I asked.

“Yes it does,” Stacy told me. “I defrost six ounces the night before and cook it up. Eat three ounces for dinner and have the rest in the morning.”

“Do you feel bad eating so many cows?” I know that I’m a hypocrite these days when it comes to meat. I feel like my body needs it, especially for the B-12, but I still can’t swallow it down without thinking of the poor chicken or cow’s extended family.

Stacy just looked at me quizzically.

“I mean, do you think they have feelings?” I prodded.

“No more than dogs,” she said. “They’re not domesticated.”

I wasn’t really satisfied by that answer, but I went on to ask a more…err….burning question, one brought to my attention by an ardent vegan friend. It was about the methane buildup in the atmosphere because of so many cows constantly err… releasing gas. “Do you think the cows mmmming in the air causes a problem?” I said, “mmming” like I was too proper to use the ‘f’ word, like it was a fill-in-the-blank activity.

To her credit, Stacy knew exactly what I was asking. “No, the farmers make their livelihood by keeping the environment clean. Why would they want to mess it up?”

It was an interesting response. I looked around the beef booth, mulling over everything she had told me. And that’s when all of a sudden I noticed all the booklets on the beef table.

“Oh, those are our curricula,” Stacy said.

“Curricula? Beef curricula?”

“We have history, Spanish, cultural diversity.”

I couldn’t believe I had just discovered the curricula and it was already 4:25pm. I had to be at the Barnes and Noble table signing at 4:30pm.

“They’re not beef-centric,” Stacy assured me.

Udderly fascinated, I thanked Stacy. Then it was time for me to mooove along.

The Washington Post and ABC News recently released a joint poll about the impact of race on the presidential election.

…nearly half of all Americans say race relations in the country are in bad shape, and three in 10 acknowledge feelings of racial prejudice.

The survey also reveals that:

More than six in 10 African Americans now rate race relations as “not so good” or “poor,” while 53 percent of whites hold more positive views.

So the majority of whites claim to hold more positive views of race relations? I hate to be cynical, but I have to wonder what the gap is between one’s professed views and his or her actual views, especially after the telephone conversation I had about two months ago with RJ (not his real name), who told me he’s absolutely not prejudiced and there’s no race problem in his state.

RJ is a white man in his seventies who lives in the Mississippi Delta. He does church-related work and has lived and worked in the Deep South all his life.

I decided to send RJ my new book for young readers, because I heard he had contacts with a large network of private schools in the South. My book A Thousand Never Evers is set in 1963 Mississippi and recounts a 12-year-old African American girl’s personal struggle to come to terms with her racist society. I was hoping that RJ might introduce the book to educators he knows.

“So how did you like it?” I asked.

“We come from two different opinions on this stuff,” RJ told me. Then he drew in a breath. A really big breath. And from there, he spoke his mind—seven single-spaced pages worth.

When I asked if I could use what he wrote on my website, he said I could so long as I didn’t use his name. He said, “To tell the truth the way it is could be real dangerous.”

(more…)

I remember when I was 14 and my parents came to pick me up from overnight camp. My counselor had to physically pry me apart from my new best friends. That’s what I felt like leaving the Awesome Austin Writers Workshop on Sunday.

The three-day writing seminar brought together 27 advanced children’s writers from Austin. We assembled at the home of YA authors Cynthia and Greg Leitich-Smith to build community and critique manuscripts.

Cyn did a masterful job leading 40-minute critique sessions. The first portion of each critique was devoted to helping the writer understand what he or she did well. As our fearless leader rightfully pointed out, this is often as useful to a writer as hearing areas for improvement. I couldn’t agree more!

It was clear from the level of discussion that everyone in attendance had spent hours poring over each manuscript, analyzing it, and writing up helpful suggestions to help the writer revise. I especially loved the end of each session when Cyn shared her gems related to the particular genre we had just explored. And she often suggested useful exercises such as rewriting a scene from the point-of-view of the antagonist to help us understand our characters better, or rewriting a chapter using only dialogue to help discover what’s essential and what can be cut.

In addition to all that we learned about writing, I think everyone came away with an intense sense of community. I’ve never been on a football team, but I imagine this is the bond I’d feel with my buddies after my team won the State Championship. Given the fact that writing is often a solitary sport, the Awesome Austin Writers Workshop was really something to cheer about!