This week’s issue of The Gracie Press Newsletter was sent out yesterday morning. if yours did not arrive in your email “inbox,” you may want to check your “junk” or “spam” folders.

The drawing above is this week’s cover image, The story excerpt centers around songbirds. My day begins with listening to the songbirds in the early dawn while I am making a breakfast salad for my chickens. It ends with listening to the songbirds in the evening while I sit under the camellias and enjoy time with my chickens. Songbirds play an important role in our stories, and you can read more about their secret lives in “The Living Library”! Hopefully it will spark your imagination. To subscribe, just go to newsletter.GraciePress.com and provide your email address.

I have tried to keep “My Life With Gracie” as true to actual events as I can, but maybe hindsight really is better that foresight. “My Life With Gracie” started as a kind of journal with cartoon illustrations. I’ve included photos of all the chickens in “My Life With Gracie” so people would know they are real chickens, not fictional chickens. I included Blanche’s death in several posts here. Her death was even the mid-point of How To Explain Christmas To Chickens.

But maybe what I share with “Gracie Press” doesn’t have to be limited by time or real events. (Doesn’t that sound odd coming from someone whose books are categorized as fiction?!) With “Gracie Press,” my six little girls, including Blanche, can continue to have adventures for as long as I am able to draw them and write about them.

I like that, and this week, the newsletter was signed differently. I signed it:

Thanks so much for reading!

John, Gracie, Bessie, Blanche, Pearl, Emily, and Amelia

It felt very good to include Blanche.

And so maybe “Gracie Press” is sort of a fresh start in a completely different way. The six little hens who I love so much will always be together. They will always dance and explore and spark the imaginations of new generations of readers. At least that is my hope now.

How does that sound to you?