RUSH: Sue in Jacksonville, Florida. Great to have you. Thank you for waiting. I know you’ve been holding there for quite a while.
CALLER: Thank you so much for taking my call.
RUSH: You bet.
CALLER: I wanted to thank you and Kathryn, and Kathryn for inspiring and encouraging you to write your books.
RUSH: Oh, yeah. She did that. (laughing)
CALLER: I would like her to have my heartfelt thanks because the books are wonderful. My question to you, Rush, is have you any plans to have these books put into Braille for the blind and visually impaired?
RUSH: This is a tough answer, because my answer is going to be kind of broad-based. We would love to have these books printed in Spanish. We would love for these books to be distributed in a wide variety of ways. We would love for there someday to be animated versions. We would love for there someday to be perhaps even a feature-length animated video or movie of each of these stories because there are so many different ways that young people consume media, reading is one way of course. And we would love for everybody to be able to. Braille is — I can’t lie to you and say, “Yeah, it’s on the front burner here.” But I can tell you that we are looking at any number of ways to bring the Rush Revere series to as many people as possible.
CALLER: I just thought about all the parents and grandparents who would love to be able to read your books to their children and grandchildren.
RUSH: That was one of the hopes. When the first book came out I made a point of telling people about it, “It’s a book for the whole family. It’s for kids to read. It’s written for the 10- to 13-year-old age group. But it’s for parents and grandparents to actually read with young people.”
CALLER: Absolutely.
RUSH: We make the assumption that most of what’s in the books properly educated parents and adults already know. What we found is — and this has been intriguing, too, is a lot of adults are telling me that there are things in these books, say about the first Thanksgiving or the Pilgrims, that they weren’t taught either when they were in school. So it’s even been a learning thing for adults. We really hope that that’s going on, grandparents discussing all this with their grandkids. I know my grandparents discussed this kind of stuff with us. It would be great if that’s happening.
CALLER: It would be a wonderful thing because I know there are many people who could benefit. Not just the children in the schools, but adults with their grandchildren and children. And it’s okay to listen to them, but you need to be able to read. Reading is a big thing for me.
RUSH: Well, I know. It’s a different level of comprehension when you’re reading as opposed to hearing it.
CALLER: Absolutely.
RUSH: The power of the written word is undeniable. Do you use Braille yourself?
CALLER: No. But I have known people in the past and I know they have gotten books and things from the Library of Congress. And when you were talking about your books, it crossed my mind that perhaps there would be a way for them to access your books through the Library of Congress.
RUSH: Well, it’s a great thought. One of the things that we’re working on that I can assure you of is coordinating in certain ways with kids and their education, such as lesson plans that are going to be on the Rush Revere website, the Adventures of Rush Revere website.
CALLER: That’s wonderful.
RUSH: Now, we do have plans for there to be those lesson plans in Braille and they will include excerpts and elements of seminal stories in each book. So we will have that available as part of the reach-out or outreach that we’re doing. We got a lot of things like that planned. I don’t want to get into detail because it’s going to take awhile to roll them all out. But Braille, yes. That is something that’s definitely in the hopper, at least for these lesson plans that we want to do.