Local teacher, author hosting launch party for new book

Teacher and author William Markham will be hosting a book launch party at Massanutten Regional Library on May 10.

The Great Bacon Escape was written to teach students how to write. “When we talked about snapshots, I’d write a snapshot. Exploded moments, I’d write one. More importantly, I wanted to show them that writing is a marathon where you wrestle with ideas, grapple with rewrites, and sometimes…throw it all out the window,” says Markham, a fifth-grade teacher in Rockingham County.

The original story idea involved bacon-like aliens and broken down spaceships. It was a hodge-podge of suggestions provided by students. So Markham started writing. “Three chapters in, I realized the story wasn’t working. So I started over. I kept one if the characters, but picked a new problem. This time, the story all but wrote itself.” The new premise? A piece of bacon escaping from the refrigerator.

The first draft was written in a month and a half. That was the easy part. Then came the revisions. “It’s the step of the writing process that budding writers struggle with the most, and I wanted to show them how important it really is.”

The finished version will be available for purchase on May 1st. The launch party at Massanutten Regional Library will feature bacon-themed games, refreshments, a reading by the author, and a book signing.