Buzzing with Stories: A Visit with Author, Librarian, Teacher Janice N. Harrington

Abstract

Vernon, Alabama, 1962, before breakfast on a school day

Cast-iron skillets clatter on the woodburning stove. Do you hear them? That’s the sound six-year-old Janice loves waking up to. She follows it to the kitchen where her grandmother makes biscuits. Janice watches the sifting and mixing and, while her grandmother works, Janice tells her stories. The one about a dog with a big bone who stops on a bridge and sees another dog with a bone looking back. Then the one about the terrible monster in Rabbit’s house (it’s a bee).

“I’d tell her stories and she’d ask questions or laugh or ‘mm-hm,’” Harrington says. “And sometimes she’d start pounding that dough until flour flew everywhere! My stories literally filled the air, and I loved it!”