Happy first book birthday to The Clock and the Boulder! My middle-grade time-travel novel was published one year ago today on April 22, 2025. I know of readers in the US, Canada, and Sweden. I can see copies have been purchased in Brazil and the UK. And one Amazon reviewer described reading it on an airplane AND was even kind enough to post a photo of the book “sitting” by the window with the airplane wing outside. It warms my heart to think of all those people (maybe you among them!) following Kerstin on her time travel adventure to 1755 rural southern Sweden and meeting people, places, and animal friends along with her.
Today is also the tenth anniversary of the date that Kerstin time-traveled from the 21st century in the book. For the book’s plot, I needed a specific year so that the characters could have a time reference. I chose 2016 for a variety of reasons related to the story, including having a later-April full moon.
The two dates being April 22 is not a coincidence. When I was working toward publishing The Clock and the Boulder, I found that a helpful way to motivate myself was to set a publication date that was meaningful to me and chose April 22. That little bit of motivation worked.
Happy Double Anniversary to The Clock and the Boulder!
February 28 is Maja day on the Swedish calendar, and I have some Majas to celebrate.
For those new to the name day concept, in many European countries each day of the calendar is associated with a few names. This originated with names associated with saints and is now another day to celebrate, similar to a birthday. As someone who likes dates, names, and celebrating people, I’m all for it. You can read a short description and look for names on various calendars here: https://www.behindthename.com/namedays/
For over a decade, I’ve enjoyed keeping up with Swedish name days with the yearly Sverigealmanacken, artwork by Erkers Marie Persson and Erkers Linda Leander
In Swedish, the letter J is pronounced like Y in English, so the name Maja is equivalent to the names Maya and Maia. However, Swedish speakers put a bit more stress on the second syllable so it sounds more like: my-YUH.
The first significant Maja for me was my six times great grandmother Maja Nilsdotter who lived in rural southern Sweden from 1713 to 1787. I first learned of her when I was a teenager helping my grandmother organize genealogy materials. My task was to look through documents to confirm names, places, and dates and to record sources. That was the beginning of my longtime love of genealogy research. I loved the patterns in the dates, the poetry of the names (I’m related to a Hannah Hand and an Essais Humble), and, most of all, the little clues that suggested stories.
One of those clues was a note next to Maja Nilsdotter’s name in a compilation of information sourced from original records. The note said “Little information. Maja could read her own books.” I was fascinated by the idea that a woman’s relationship to books was worthy of a note that persisted through centuries. Those words stuck with me. Many years later, I did research to better understand what the note might mean. It became even more mysterious when I learned that books were very expensive to produce and own at that time. By the 1780s Swedish people of all ages, genders, and classes were required to be able to read (so that they could read the bible), so the reading itself is not remarkable. But the idea that she owned books is.
The Clock and the Boulder, front cover
My middle-grade novel The Clock and the Boulder was partially inspired by a real farm in the area of Sweden where Maja Nilsdotter lived. Last I knew, it was owned by a distant cousin of mine and had been in my family for over three hundred years. The contrast between that geographic consistency with my more recent family history amazed me. I decided to explore this by writing about a modern girl, with a similar farm in her family, who moved often for a parent’s job but longed to stay in one place. She would time travel to that farm and meet a girl who longed for a life not bound by her own village. In honor of Maja Nilsdotter, I named the girl in the past Maja.
Like many authors, the more I work with my characters, the more I have a sense of them as distinct personalities. I became very fond of Maja, the character. She is clever and capable, and her curiosity helps her open her mind and her heart to a girl in strange clothing who mysteriously appears one morning by a special boulder. I imagine that Maja, the ancestor—who could read her own books—would be delighted that someday one of her descendants would write a book and name such a character after her. I celebrate both Majas today!
Wishing you a belated but meaningful celebration of Read Your World Day 2026! And more timely wishes for an educational and celebratory Black History Month!
This year’s Read Your World Day was Thursday, January 29, but due to a variety of factors my book and I came together a little late. That timing was serendipitous because I was assigned an important book for Black History Month. A big thank you to Albert Whitman & Co. for sending me a copy of their 2025 picture book Freedom at Dawn: Robert Smalls’s Voyage Out of Slavery, written by Leah Schanke and illustrated by Oboh Moses.
Freedom at Dawn, cover image
Based on true events, Freedom at Dawn recounts how Robert Smalls, an enslaved boat pilot, devises and carries out a plan to sail his family plus twelve others to freedom right out of Charleston, South Carolina’s Confederate harbor under the cover of night. Author Schanke tells the story from the point of view of Smalls’s young daughter, Lizzie. The clearly portrayed love and thoughtfulness of Lizzie’s parents create a container that allows Schanke to expose young readers to the dire situation of their family and other enslaved people in a way children can absorb. At the same time, readers are reminded that real people have used their skills, smarts, and bravery to escape the most dangerous of situations.
Despite the grim circumstances, the setting of the story—mostly on or near the water and in the boat—creates opportunities for dynamic, aesthetic images. Illustrator Oboh Moses uses a painting style that gives a sense of history come to life. He deftly portrays emotion and caring in the characters’ faces and stances.
Freedom at Dawn, spread
The book is a lovely item to hold. It welcomes readers with the ideas of freedom and dawn in the title and with the colors of a miraculous sunrise on the cover and title page, and echoed in the end papers. Back matter sections provide more information about the US Civil War and Smalls, who went on to fight on the Union side in the Civil War and later serve five terms in the US House of Representatives. I recommend Freedom at Dawn wholeheartedly to schools, libraries, and families who are looking for ways to introduce children to the painful-but-foundational history of slavery in the United States and who want to provide inspiration through a true story of courage and wit.
Though Read Your World Day 2026 has passed, you can access the book reviews for the event on this Giant Linky, and you can view a recording of the Read Your World Day virtual party and its slide deck here.
I also want to shout-out my friend and champion of Black History, Tamara Shiloh. I was fortunate to get to know her through editing her Just Imagine series, fantasy stories that introduce kids to real Black inventors and scientists who impact our everyday lives but are often overlooked. She also offers an educational program for teachers on teaching Black History all year long. AND she owns and operates my geographically closest independent bookstore, Multicultural Bookstore and Gifts, which is a joy to visit and takes online orders as well.
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Read Your World 2026 (1/29/26) is in its 14th year! Valarie Budayr and Mia Wenjen founded this non-profit children’s literacy initiative; they are two diverse book-loving moms who saw a need to shine the spotlight on all of the multicultural diverse books and authors on the market while also working to get those books into the hands of young readers and educators.
Read Your World’s mission is to raise awareness of the need to include kids’ books celebrating diversity in homes and school bookshelves. Read about our Mission and history HERE.
Read Your World is honored to be Supported by these Medallion:
I’m sharing a poem that is a tribute to two dogs, one fictional and one historical. It’s also a tribute to the enchanting connections that sometimes come when researching a novel.
This is another of my ars novelica poems—a term I coined for poems about the process of writing a novel, after ars poetica, a long-established term for poems about writing poetry.
Alric and Pompe
Fictional Alric barks in my head I’ve left him out of my novel’s end
So I’m researching 1755 Sweden again Would a family farm dog hang out in a house?
My fingertips tap the keyboard to search And a real-life pup pops onto my screen
Pompe, companion of the Swedish naturalist who coined the term Canis familiaris
Yes, Pompe and Linnaeus, an old story goes, walked together each Sunday to church to attend
for exactly one hour, side-by-side in a pew, then even mid-sermon, they’d get up and leave
And on weeks the biologist was home feeling ill the canine was an hour-long churchgoer still
Historical Pompe cracks open the door for my character Alric to saunter inside,
insert himself into a favorite scene, and plop down at my protagonist’s feet
When I wrote The Clock and the Boulder I wanted to create an authentic sense of time travel, including accurate specifics of everyday life in 1755 rural Småland, Sweden. I researched details such as clothing, tools, home construction, and diet. In a later round of editing—long after I’d pored over an interlibrary loan book about Scandinavian footware and scooped up a used volume on Swedish quilts—I realized that I needed to know if an eighteenth century Swedish farm dog would be welcome in a house.
My internet search did not provide satisfying results. So I tried posting to the Swedish Traditions and Culture forum on Facebook. Not only did people have perspectives and anecdotes from their own family histories that suggested farm dogs would be welcome in a house, but a couple people alerted me to the story about the Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) and his dog Pompe, which is described in the poem. Linnaeus created the naming system and many of the scientific names for plants and animals still used today—including the scientific name for dogs themselves, Canis familiaris.
One detail that is not mentioned specifically in The Clock and the Boulder is that Alric is a Swedish Vallhund, a breed with a history in Sweden that goes back over a thousand years to the Viking days. You can read more about Swedish Vallhunds and enjoy some adorable photos here: https://www.akc.org/dog-breeds/swedish-vallhund/.
Here is how Alric is depicted on the back cover of The Clock and the Boulder by cover artist Marik Berghs. I could not find a portrait of Pompe, but I like that these two dogs now are connected, across time and imagination.
Illustration by Marik Berghs from back cover of The Clock and the Boulder by Karin Fisher-Golton
For a thought-provoking poem by Laura Purdie Salas, in the form of a letter from peace to humans, plus links to to more poems on this Poetry Friday, visit Tabatha’s The Opposite of Indifference blog. Thank you, Tabatha, for hosting!
It’s the last Poetry Friday of National Poetry Month 2025 and the end of a week that included both Earth Day and the launch of The Clock and the Boulder, my time-travel novel for ages 9-12—a book that takes place at this time of year. To honor them all, I’m sharing a poem that I wrote a few years ago about one of my favorite features of spring. This all ties together in my head—April springtime, new beginnings, the natural world, and the rich details of language.
Birdsong on a Spring Morning
Tiny, full notes sound like the starts of pink, yellow, green leaves, buds, blades of grass.
Listen, hear the wonders of beaks and feathers warming a small winged being. And another answers back.
To go with the poem and these themes, here is a detail from the back cover of The Clock and the Boulder. The protagonist loves sewing and animals. I was grateful that the cover artist, Marik Berghs, thought to bring those aspects together in this little image.
I’m continuing to share poems connected to writing my novel, The Clock and the Boulder, in the lead up to its April 22 release in this National Poetry Month.
Today I chose two short poems, both about aspects of the process of writing a novel. I think of them as “ars novelica,” a play on ars poetica, which is poetry about writing poetry.
I wrote the first one in February 2019, when I was toward the end of developing the story. I was quite taken with a little note I’d jotted down on a scrap of paper. It became the title of this poem. I like that the title is longer than any of the lines in the poem and has more specific detail than the poem itself.
Anders Will Need to Replace the Hay
a novel is born and honed via minutiae and non-sequitur captured on scraps of paper
I wrote the second poem, a butterfly cinquain, this February during the time when I was putting the finishing touches on the text.
A cinquain is a poem with lines that have 2, 4, 6, 8, and 2 syllables in that order. A butterfly cinquain adds 4 more lines of 8, 6, 4, and 2 syllables. When these poems are centered, they look like sideways butterflies. I first wrote this one centered, but I like how it reads better this way.
Character
to start a character is a book problem solved, quirky touches worked in, until a shift occurs, it has its own presence, distinct from the author, who’ll miss it at the end
Enjoy more poetry this Friday and savor it into this mid-National-Poetry-Month weekend! The Poetry Friday round up is at Irene Latham’s Live Your Poem blog.
Happy April 2025! It’s National Poetry Month and the publication month of my time-travel novel for ages 9-12, The Clock and the Boulder. This book, which will be released April 22, 2025, is set in the USA in 2016 and rural Sweden in 1755 and is about finding friendship and one’s own sense of home. You can read more about it here.
In the many years I’ve spent working on this book, sometimes I’ve found it helpful and fun to write poetry as part of that process. Sharing some of that poetry seems perfect for this month.
I love the idea of time travel. Books allow us to travel through both time and space in our imaginations, both as readers and as writers.
The poem I share below does not represent a moment in The Clock and the Boulder, but part of the reality of some of its characters that would impact their lives and certain elements of the story. I enjoyed multiple journeys through time writing it and hope you will when you read it.
Winter Warmth, Sweden, ca. 1700
The earth of the hearth is the stones— cooled and crushed from the magma, much later dug from the ground, hefted, lifted, arranged, adhered to form a safe container and to guide smoke away. And it is trees grown in the soil and fed by the sun, cut, split, burned, turned to ash releasing warmth to heat food that fills bellies, to warm flesh through the long, cold winter.
The heart of the hearth is the soul— familiar family, welcomed guests gathered ‘round, sewing, spinning, weaving tinkering, mending, repairing sharing food, telling stories of the family, folklore, religion, singing songs to lift spirits through the long, dark winter.
It’s the Jewish holiday Tu B’Shvat (the 15th of the Jewish month Shvat), called the birthday of the trees. Originally used for agricultural accounting, in modern times on this day we celebrate the many gifts of trees, including shade, food, beauty, inspiration, and oxygen in the air. Happy birthday and thank you, trees!
And in this secular month of February, my poetry group and I are in our twelfth year of a month-long poetry writing commitment. For me this year, it’s a poem every other day. Most years the two Ceanothus trees in my front yard show up in a poem. At this time of year, they are either getting ready to or beginning to blossom in my favorite color, purple.
A note: I usually call this family of trees and shrubs by its scientific name, Ceanothus, but I used its English name “California Lilac” for the title, because lilac is a shade of purple and California associates it with this place. I think they are called lilacs for the color and shape of the flowers. They don’t have that wonderful lilac aroma.
California Lilac
Ceanothus, densely dotted with pale buds amongst little, leathery leaves purple potential
buds burst to abundance of blunt brush-like blossoms purple profusion
Ceanothus “frosty blue” 2/12/2025, in the stanza 1/”purple potential” phaseCeanothus “Ray Hartman” 3/19/2024, in the stanza 2 / “purple profusion” phase
I’ll share this post for Poetry Friday tomorrow. For those looking for more Friday poetry that day, visit this week’s host Linda Baie at https://www.teacherdance.org for an abundance of poetry links.
Also blossoming is my communication about my writing. I’ve made an email list for those who want to keep the most up-to-date about my projects, with a particular focus now on my upcoming middle grade time-travel novel. More on that book here soon. I send occasional emails when I have something to share. You can click here for a little more information and the opportunity to sign up (if you haven’t yet): https://tinyurl.com/KarinSubscribe2.
Happy Read Your World Day! This 13-year tradition of celebrating diverse children’s books, formerly called Multicultural Children’s Book Day, has a new name. The non-profit that organizes this event has become involved in more than the yearly celebration. Activities also include providing instructional materials and books to schools and libraries, curating book lists, spreading the word about diverse books and their authors through social media, and sponsoring the Pedro and Daniel Intersectionality Book Awards. (You can read more about all those activities here.) They’ve long had the motto “Read Your World,” which I love. To me it both means read about the world that reflects yourself and means read about the diversity that exists in the world we live in. It is now the name of the organization and the day.
As you may know, I’ve been proud to volunteer for Read Your World for many years and have served on its Board of Advisors since 2020.
This year, I thank Lerner Publishing/Carolrhoda Books for sending me a copy of the picture book Slippery, Spicy, Tingly: A Kimchi Mystery by author-illustrator Yangsook Choi. On the surface it is the story of a boy’s lively halmoni (grandmother in Korean) visiting and making kimchi with him and his parents in the traditional way, but it is so much more—all within the compact picture book format.
Slippery, Spicy, Tingly by Yangsook Choi, cover image
What I love most about Slippery, Spicy, Tingly is that it is a sensory experience! Those words in the title come up not only related to kimchi, but to elements of Halmoni’s personality and the boy protagonist Keo’s experience. There are other wonderful sensory details as well, such as the smell of dirt, the tickling of feet, and the crunch of kimchi that isn’t ready yet. This book would make a great starting point to invite children to notice these kinds of details and the words we use to describe them, either at school or at home.
Slippery, Spicy, Tingly by Yangsook Choi, interior spread
I always appreciate a layered grandparent character in a children’s book, and Keo’s halmoni certainly fits that description. Keo wonders about his importance in her full life. Some of her actions are mysterious him. They include digging a pit in his back yard and putting a giant clay jar inside! He comes to see that her process of making traditional kimchi not only results in one of his favorite foods, but is an act of love.
Though I’ve never made kimchi, I have made sauerkraut, and I can attest to how fascinating and delicious the fermentation process is. I know it to be quite nutritious as well. Yangsook Choi portrays all these aspects deftly within the story, in ways children can understand without a sense of being lectured. Her Author’s Note at the end provides more information.
I recommend Slippery, Spicy, Tingly for those interested in sensory adjectives, family traditions, Korean traditions, nutrition, fermented foods, and, of course, kimchi.
Read Your World 2025 (1/30/25) is in its 13th year! Valarie Budayr and Mia Wenjen founded this non-profit children’s literacy initiative; they are two diverse book-loving moms who saw a need to shine the spotlight on all of the multicultural diverse books and authors on the market while also working to get those books into the hands of young readers and educators.
Read Your World’s mission is to raise awareness of the need to include kids’ books celebrating diversity in homes and school bookshelves. Read about our Mission and history HERE.
Read Your World is honored to be Supported by these Medallion:
Join us on Thursday, January 30, 2025, at 9 pm EST celebrating 13 years of Read Your World Day Virtual Party! Register here.
This epically fun and fast-paced hour includes multicultural book discussions, addressing timely issues, diverse book recommendations, & reading ideas.
We will be giving away a 10-Book Bundle during the virtual party plus Bonus Prizes as well! *** US and Global participants are welcome. **
Follow the hashtag #ReadYourWorld to join the conversation, and connect with like-minded parts, authors, publishers, educators, organizations, and librarians. We look forward to seeing you all on January 30, 2025, at our virtual party!
I'm Karin Fisher-Golton. I love the water and my family and friends—this photo reminds me of both. I write picture books, poetry, early readers, middle grade novels, and nonfiction for children. I also edit children's books (picture books through young adult books). Click on my photo above for more about me.
Karin Fisher-Golton 