The Author

Over the past few months, my mom has been completely manical about trying to get everything that I ever owned out of her attic! In one box she sent over I even found 6 or 7 old retainers, which I'm really glad were kicking around for the last twelve years just to finally end up in the proper garbage can. On Sunday, I mentioned to my mom that I was redoing our bookshelves in the living room since the clutter of every photo we have printed was starting to be a bit much to look at and I wanted something a little more manageable for the eye. She took the opportunity to suggest that I take my boxes of books home with me, and of course, she threw in a couple extra boxes as well. The extra boxes contained mostly scrapbooks from my childhood through high school that my mom had assembled. I haven't really dove into looking at them all, but I did manage to find a handful of books I wrote as a child, mostly in third grade. Reading through these books was way more fun than it probably should have been and even 20 years later - I thought they were pretty good. I think my favorite part about the books is how much I really tried to model an actual published book. All of my books have not only the title and author's name listed, but also the illustrator (myself, again). A publisher (mostly J.V. Publishing or Detar Publishing, my third grade teacher's name,  or Jenna Publishing), a copyright, and a dedication page. At the end of every book is an About the Author page and in one of them I even included a picture or myself on this page. The About the Author page is definitely my favorite; it's exactly the same in every book and apparently includes all the important details that my readers need to know about me.

Jenna Van Lieshout was born in 1986 in Batavia Hospital and lives in Albion. She goes to Albion Primary School. She is in third grade. Her family two brothers Alex and Mitchell a mom and dad and a cat named shadow. She has written 5 stories including John F Kennedy. She gets her ideas from work at school. Her favorite sport is dance. She went to Washington D.C. when she was seven years old.

The first book I read this in, I thought I had included dance as a favorite sport because the title of the book was The Elephant Who Took Ballet. And I really couldn't figure out why I found it important to tell everyone about some random vacation my family took. Then I realized, the whole thing was pretty random and I had included the exact passage in every book of mine. Also, I wish someone had taken the opportunity to give me a lesson in grammer. I read the teacher comments in the one book that had teacher comments and they all just talk about my great imagination. I mean, a little constructive critism would be nice!

And my newly arranged bookshelves.