The Highlights Foundation

the one where I unapologetically rave about this place

I am not getting paid to say this, I promise. If you are a writer or illustrator (or want to be) for children, then you should try to get to the Highlights Foundation at least once in your life.

The Barn- where all the learning and eating takes place - this doesn’t give it justice but it’s the only photo I took.

I’m not going to write about Highlights in detail, as you can easily read about their inception, mission and programming on their website. I mostly want to ensure you that if (when) you go, you will be taken great care of. This is a safe space for all. An encouraging environment for all. A learning and growing place that desires to hold important conversations that surround children’s literature just as much as the literature and craft itself. I’m blown away every time I go.

For me it’s a very personal and beloved place. Like many kids, I grew up with Highlights magazine. It was the one piece of mail that came just for me! About 15 years ago my good friend Donna Galanti introduced me to then just beginning to bloom campus. This was before the famous Barn was finished, before the Lodge was built, before the cabins were all opened to guests. We had dinner with Kent Brown, the then Director, just the two of us. And we encouraged him to charge more—even though that would mean pricing me out, haha—because we could see the incredible value of this place.

Today it’s so much more than just a writing retreat.

I just returned from the Writing through Trauma workshop/retreat and am still thinking about how to properly write about the experience. Although I don’t know if I’m going to share it here because it was very intimate, private and feels like something to be protected—if not for me, for the other people who attended. I’m just grateful Rebecca Dykes Writers and Highlights held us in a way that allowed some intense conversations, gentle meditation, tears, and a lot of laughter.

Me and Jane Houng, the founder of Rebecca Dykes Writers

I didn’t write a ton, but I did write. About rocks. Turns out for me, writing through trauma doesn’t always mean writing didactically about a specific trauma. I focused more on the healing side, the mending side. This will be a longer piece, but here’s the taste I read on our open mic night.

In 1983, I was digging in a pile of rocks. This was not uncommon behavior. It’s still not. I was always searching for natural treasures of some sort–stones, fossils, owl pellets, salamanders, toads, flowers, fairies, smurfs. There were no limits back then. This particular afternoon I was at a neighbor’s house, a family who had a dairy farm a couple miles down the road from us, who would watch me from time to time. I didn’t love going there. There were two boys, one of whom was in my grade, who I was pretty sure drowned one of my cats by barricading it in a drainage pipe. The girls were quite a bit older than me and were often sunning themselves on lounge chairs with foil-covered cardboard held at their necks like a guillotine. I fit in somewhere between the mean, outdoorsy boys and oiled-up teen girls, where most of us fall. An often dirty, bookish, loner of a kid who loved wearing costumes while fishing or walking barefoot through the creek looking for tadpoles just beginning to show their new legs. I stole jars of pickles from my mother’s canning shelves, and built campfires in the woods where I’d fantasize about living, alone, away from the violence in my house. And I wrote stories about falling in love on deserted islands. I was an amalgamation of pre-puberty gender freedom never to appear in quite the same precious form again. 

Back to rocks. I did find a treasure that day. The pile was mostly typical granite gravel, gray and reliable, but there were other stones mixed in, two of which once I spotted, I dug for hours to find more. One of them was an opaque orange metamorphic something and one was opal. The orange rock was pretty, but I knew opal, it was a gemstone. Opal didn’t belong in New Jersey in a pile of hard, angular granite. Opal was special, something to be valued and admired; and it was sneaky. Melted into the corners of a dull-looking piece of sandstone maybe? Hiding in plain sight. Was I rich? I found three pieces, tucked them in my pocket, and held on to them for the rest of my life. Part of my ongoing rock collection.

But it’s not just rocks. I remember where I was standing when I picked up an individual sycamore leaf that dwarfed the size of my head. The uninhabited island I stood on in the gulf where conch shells littered the beach like fallen stars. I was allowed one. I’ve saved shards of Yellow Ware from hiking trails, unearthed from the pounding of heavy boots. Retrieved medicine bottles from the early 20th century farmhouse foundations.

We are returning to the mountains in West Virginia soon, to a territory called Old Fields, land originally cleared and owned by the Massawomeck. I plan on resuming my hobby of filling up jars with feathers and old printing press trays with Sweet Gum seed pods, dried thistles, forgotten hummingbird nests, fossils, and, yes, continuing my rock collection. 

I love the proof of an earth and people much older than I. They know something. Maybe if I hold a stone in my hand long enough I will hear the whispers.

A friend says there is trauma in our soil. Just a few days ago we had a 4.8 earthquake in New Jersey. Yes, I understand the mechanics of seismic activity, but all I can think now is there’s trauma in our soil. There is trauma in our rocks. It comes up through the earth, you can feel it when you walk barefoot. It grounds you, informs you, enrages you, comforts you. 

If you take the time to squat at the creekside and examine the variety of beautiful brokenness under your toes, you may find a piece that looks exactly like you. 

Put it in your pocket. 

This was found on a walk with my husband, a few days before the retreat, about ten minutes after I told him I had a plan to write about rocks.