At a school I recently visited on my Cheesie Mack book tour, I arrived as breakfast was being served. It was a sugary, carbo feast, consisting of a paper carton of chocolate milk, a plastic container of sweetened applesauce and a hard boiled egg in a twist-tied plastic bag, and a cinnamon bun in cellophane. [...]
Author Archives: Steve Cotler
Celebrating the Holidays and Rewriting
December 22, 2011 – 10:46 am
My web design firm, Waxcreative Design, knows how to get authors noticed. In addition to great aesthetics, they are expert at branding, marketing, and promotion. They are also good people. I am honored this Holiday Season to be featured on their New Year’s card. About 100 school sessions ago,
Cheesie Mack and Mac ‘n’ Cheese
November 2, 2011 – 7:25 pm
Every author visit I make to schools around the country is different. Schools have distinct personalities, and my presentation is redirected by local influences. One school might put up posters and have a Cheesie Mack Day. Another might get me interviewed by the local newspaper. But for every school, in this time of tight budgets [...]
Mac Crash
October 29, 2011 – 7:21 am
My 3.5-year-old Macbook Pro went on the disabled list Wednesday. Symptoms: Normal start up, but then, as the blue screen and desktop icons appeared, so did the spinning beach ball of death…and a queasy stomach. Interior sirens wailing, I rushed to my not-too-far-away Apple Store where, amid dozens of milling i-enthusiasts, the patient was taken [...]
Steve Cotler in Harvard Business School Alumni Bulletin
September 26, 2011 – 9:26 pm
For fairly obvious reasons, Harvard Business School keeps very good track of and contact with its alumni. One of the best things they do is their magazine, HBS Alumni Bulletin. Some of the articles are interesting, okay, uh-huh, but the real reason alumni turn this mag’s pages is the Class Notes. Every class that still [...]
Cheesie Mack: Back Home in Massachusetts
September 22, 2011 – 3:43 pm
Cheesie returns to his home state in a couple of days for a two-week whirlwind of book events. The lad “lives” in Gloucester, so of course I’ll be speaking at two elementary schools there, as well as schools, both public and private, in Cambridge, Arlington, Newton, Sutton, Millbury, and Auburn. Plus libraries in Easton, and [...]
Ruth Lilly Fellowships in Poetry — 2011
September 5, 2011 – 9:20 pm
The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, and “an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture,” has announced the five recipients of Ruth Lilly Fellowships for 2011. My son, Theodore Zachary Cotler, was one of the winners. Quoting from the Poetry Foundations’s website: The editors of Poetry magazine selected [...]
Cheesie Mack and the Reading Detectives
August 16, 2011 – 12:41 pm
How do you get kids excited about reading? My answer is to show them how reading a good book is an adventure in itself. I get them to ask themselves questions. Questions like: Who are these characters? Why did the plot take that turn? How did the author create this mood? I call it being [...]
Promontory Summit & the Golden Spike
August 8, 2011 – 10:00 pm
I stand astride America’s Transcontinental Railway, looking east, then west. Initiated by Lincoln, overseen by Johnson, and completed under Grant, the undertaking called for the Union Pacific Railroad to work westward from Omaha and the Central Pacific, eastward from Sacramento. They met, as most schoolchildren learned in my day (do they study this anymore?), at [...]
The Market Falls–Then and Now
August 5, 2011 – 4:13 pm
I glance at the headline of an old newspaper that had been used to insulate one of the old log cabins that make up the museum in Frisco, CO. “Bankers Blame Tax Laws for Securities Drop” (The Denver Post…November 7, 1937). The Great Depression had been ongoing for over eight years. Yesterday the Dow fell [...]
