Jeannine Atkins

For the first time in a while, I can see clear clean dates on my calendar. At the end of the semester, there are still grades to enter, recommendations to write, and plenty of housecleaning and chores that have waited, but also a drafty novel to put to rights. My notebook is filled with directions about what this thing (note not terribly affectionate name) needs. When I read a paragraph, I can think of several more changes to be made. This thing is calling out for a thousand or so fixes. So where do I begin?

This is when even vacuuming can look sort of interesting, not a good sign. Or a snack. Or another snack. This needy novel just feels too much. But there’s only so much avoidance I can do and I come back to it, wondering where to wedge my way in. Anywhere, anything I fix, would be an improvement.

Fixing this, fixing that, seems so slow and I don’t get the pleasure of seeing one very good page. All the pleas for help – fix me! – seem overwhelming. At this point I have to let myself putter and rove, because I’m still trying to get a sense of the whole picture, and stand ready to let the whole thing change. If I focus in too much, I won’t be as ready to give up, if need be, scenes or chapters. If I invest too much in a paragraph, I might not notice that I should be putting my character in a completely different place.

On the other hand, I have a secret hope that as I pick up a page and fiddle, at some point I’ll be staring at the right word that will make sense of every other. I found it! I found the key to the garden!

Maybe.

I got a call from the wonderful school librarian in the town next to mine. My mother-in-law used to volunteer there in Deerfield Elementary (how cool is it to have a librarian mother-in-law?), and Bette Schmidt’s kind, soft-spoken husband is our dogs’ vet: that’s how small-town/small-world we are. Bette told me that Michael Dooling, who illustrated two of my picture books, was coming with his wife Jane to do a presentation and I would I care to show, up, too?

It was a thrill to see them. According to Michael’s website, http://www.michaeldooling.com/ , History through Picture Books, he has visited 600 schools, illustrated 50 books, and sold a million books. I’ve got some work ahead of me. Meanwhile, we had a great lunch at Channing Bete, a local business which sponsors an annual author or illustrator’s visit. They kindly arranged trees to blossom and Mike got only the politest gawking appearing in his 18th century garb.



Then I got to watch Mike in action. The fifth and sixth graders who came in fidgety from a spring morning spent doing state-mandated tests quickly quieted down, and seemed enthralled when Mike began mixing blue and yellow to make green. Some volunteers helped him finish a portrait.

Michael showed slides, including many from MARY ANNING AND THE SEA DRAGON (he said he was nervous with the author, listening, but he was awesome.) Michael talked about the months he spends researching before beginning to sketch, and how, once he begins to paint, he steps back every few minutes to see if something’s wrong, then corrects it. Mistakes are part of the process. The students asked great questions about shading, perspective and, never mind that they haven’t begun middle school, good choices for studying art at the college level. One asked, "Of all the people you've drawn, which would you most like to have been?" The school principal beamed. Afterward one boy came over to me and said, “I know today is supposed to be about illustrating, but I’m not so good at drawing. How do YOU get your ideas?” I gave a quick answer about following what makes you curious, then he told me about how he’d wondered about how turtles breathe, told me what he’d learned, and did he maybe have the beginning of a story? Absolutely.



When I wrote the ms. for ANNE HUTCHINSON’S WAY it was my dream, and luckily my editor’s, too, to have a second book illustrated by Michael. He and I have worked separately, but we’re huge fans of each others’ work and of Farrrar, Straus and Giroux, which has kept Mary Anning and the Sea Dragon in print for nine years. I’m mulling over what I hope will become another collaboration.

It’s the last week of classes, and grading papers have put me a a bit behind with blogging and other things. Not that I’m complaining. I keep my eye on Erin’s blog bostonerin as she, too, is finishing up a semester teaching but is also about to have a baby any second, if she’d not doing that now. I already love this baby for waiting through finals.



Anyway, I had a great weekend, driving north through the Adirondack Mountains with Peg Davol to Steven Kellogg’s studio overlooking Lake Champlain where we’d meet others who’d gathered for a Children’s Literature New England conference and read passages we wrote for Our White House, Looking In, Looking Out, a project to benefit the National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance http://www.thencbla.org



The amazing anthology will be published by Candlewick Press in September. The sky was blue, apple trees in bloom and pale clouds hovered over the water and distant mountains. Steven Kellogg’s studio was bright with his own work and framed pictures done by Garth Williams, Maurice Sendak, Susan Jeffers, Howard Pyle, and his children. As people came off the ferry, trekked through the field, and entered the converted barn, almost every face lit up. It was hard to know where to look.

Many smiles later, everyone gathered under a big tent looking past apple trees in blossom, a hill where Gregory Maguire’s daughter played, her black hair blowing, down the hill to Lake Champlain. Katherine Paterson, whose Bridge to Terabithia puts me in tears every time I read it and inspired me to write for children, introduced the readers. Having her eyes rest on mine a moment, then hearing my name in her mouth: it was a wonder I could get my words out. I read from my somewhat sad piece about Woodrow Wilson, who did his best to stop WWI and start the League of Nations, and failed at both, though his ideas were later used to form the United Nations. I listened to marvelous contributors including Virginia Euwer Wolff, Susan Cooper, Mary Brigid Barrett, M. T. Anderson, Brian Selznick, and Gregory Maguire, poems, stories, essays about the wide variety of people who’d lived in the White House. A woman with regal posture took off her sunglasses and hat wound about with artificial ivy, and before I heard Linda Johnson Robb’s name I saw her resemblance to LBJ and Ladybird. She began, “Hi, y’all. I’m the only one here who’s not a professional, but they figured they should have someone who was an inmate.”



I came home to an array of pink-frosted cupcakes with Happy Mother’s Day spelled out in green, along with a gorgeous bouquet my daughter arranged. We went out to eat with my in-laws and my sister-in-law who said she’d been reading my blog. “You have great readers who comment,” she said. “Everyone seems so nice!”

“Yes,” I agreed. You are. I’m a lucky lucky person and I thank you!

A student wrote a paper on E.B. White who I adore, and now I love his father, too. Apparently E.B. White had a wonderful childhood in the country, a doted-upon youngest child, but he struggled with depression through his life. After graduating from college, he took off with a college buddy to go cross country in a Ford Model-T. (which also happens to be the dream of the college senior who wrote this paper, though with different car.) E.B. White wrote a letter to his father, apologizing for his lack of ambition.

And do you know what this generous and imaginative dad wrote back?

“If you feel that you are lacking in ambition, be assured that meditation and contemplation, of which your letter is full, is a more certain joy in life. Anyone can indulge in ambition; only those who have the spirit can revel in passive enjoyment.”

I thought this was stunning. So did my student. Although I mentioned the letter to a friend, who is the parent of child heading into the world of work, and she said, “Yeah, that’s what he wrote. We don’t know what he also might have said.”

I suppose there could have been some kind of addendum, “Get a job, slacker.” But at least he had the grace to try to see his talented son for who he was, too.

As students recently came into class, one spoke of a contingent of Little Women fans who think Jo should have skated away after Amy fell through the ice of a frozen river. And then Jo could have married Laurie. “Anyway, Laurie turned into a drunk and died young, so it worked out, “ she said.

Okay, I know Amy burned Jo’s manuscript. Which may be as bad as falling into very cold water. But I don’t know, I never really embraced the whole Laurie-Jo thing, and I kind of liked Mr. Bhaer, even though I know Louisa May Alcott, annoyed that her editor insisted that Jo needed to be married off, didn’t go out of her way to make him especially fetching.

I’ve written about May, Louisa’s real sister, who was the inspiration for Amy (note the twisted around letters) and admire the woman. She longed to be an artist in a period when that was even harder than becoming a woman writer. She left Concord, Massachusetts to spend years in Paris, France. Like Amy, she loved to flirt, but she didn’t marry until she was in her late thirties, knowing that marriage and children would likely be the end to a career in art.

I say Yay to the fictional Jo for getting over that burnt manuscript (and yay for the copiers and back-ups of our day) and hauling her little sister out of the Concord River. Other votes?

Sometimes when my heart breaks upon hearing distressing stories about the publishing world, I reread a bit of Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, which looks at art and writing in an age before commerce. It’s kind of a weighty tome (as you might guess from its subtitle, Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property) and I can’t pretend to comprehend it all, but I find courage from short dips in and out. I just reread a description at the book’s end of Pablo Neruda’s essay, “Childhood and Poetry.” Neruda speaks of being small and playing in a lot behind his house One day a tiny hand appeared through a hole in the fence. As Neruda came over to look close, the boy’s hand disappeared. In its place was a toy sheep with broken wheels. Neruda took the shabby but lovely toy, went inside his house, and brought out a fragrant pine cone, its petals open, which he loved. He put that through the hole.

Looking back, Neruda sees this as the moment he became a poet. Something beautiful and unbidden came his way. He found another treasure to give back.

I learned a few things about katydids, sloths, and many more animals, extinct and not, and met some wonderful writers and illustrators at the Cambridge Science Festival. Leslie Bulion had us clap and count, giving an overview of rhyme and rhythm, and showed how she turned the drama and violence of some insects’ lives into poetry. John Himmelman contrasted his quiet life at the illustration board with stories of stalking through swamps, avoiding snakes, alligators, and state troopers, for perfect views of rare and tiny creatures. Melissa Stewart told about hiking through the woods, getting caught in the rain, and looking up to see a squirrel with its tail curled above its head. Here was the start for her latest book, When Rain Falls.

Carol Stoltz from Porter Square Books http://www.portersquarebooks.com kindly oversaw book sales. Melissa, John, Susan, Lita litajudge and I went to that bustling bookstore later in the afternoon to speak on our lives as writers.

Here we are:

Loree Griffin Burns, Leslie Bulion, Susan Goodman, Erica Zappy, me, Melissa Stewart, and John Himmelman. (Lita Judge was out of the room.)


Loree and Erica:




Me talking about Mary Anning and the Sea Dragon:




A highlight was hearing Loree Griffin Burns lgburns discuss how her four page proposal for Tracking Trash transformed into a 64 page book after three years of close work with her editor. While all of us care about scientific methods, the mystery and surprises we find when writing was a theme throughout the day. Tracking Trash is part of Houghton Mifflin’s Scientists in the Field series, which features scientists who break the stereotype of a pale man wearing a white coat with pockets stuffed with test tubes, shuffling around a lab. So at the beginning of her talk, Loree asked the audience, “When you think of scientists, where do you think of them working?”

Below is a picture of the little girl who shot up her hand, then shouted, “M.I.T.!”
We were reminded we were in Cambridge.



I gave her the butterfly sticker she’s displaying, (“What’s your favorite color?” “All of them!”) Her brother is proudly clutching the manuscripts he brought along, which Loree’s editor, Erica Zappy, graciously looked over, appearing highly enthusiastic, though I don’t think a deal was struck.

This coming Saturday, May 3, I’m excited to participate in the Cambridge Science Festival, which bills itself as the first and only full-scale celebration of science and technology in the United States. The city of Cambridge, MA sponsors 200 free & open events designed to excite, engage and educate the public.

I’ll be at the Cambridge Public Library http://www.cambridgepubliclibrary.org/
where from 10 to 2, children’s writers and illustrators will include the amazing organizer and writer Melissa Stewart http://www.Melissa-stewart.com, who will speak on her inspiration for Where Rain Falls and other books on nature. Leslie Bulion will talk about writing poetry about stink bugs. Susan Goodman’s topics include poop and pee. Kay Kudlinkski will speak about dinosaur research and John Himmelman on research love or maybe addiction, something I’m pretty familiar with. I’m especially excited to meet Loree Burns lgburns who will be speaking with her Houghton Mifflin editor and Lita Judge litajudge both of whose work I admire so much. Loree’s Tracking Trash and Lita’s One Thousand Tracings have won many, many awards for adding to our scientific and social knowledge in ways readers really connect with.

At 1:2O I’ll be taking out some art supplies and talking about Mary Anning and the Sea Dragon and How High Can We Climb? The Story of Women Explorers. I’ll show the tiny picture of a woman in nineteeth century hoop skirt and bonnet, with a hammer in her hand, who sent my research-loving-heart a-beating. The book with the photo is owned by my husband, who once smuggled plastic dinosaurs into Sunday School, tucked into the cuff of his trousers. He hasn’t changed too much, though now the dinos are all over our bookshelves. For more information and for a schedule see: http://www.cambridgesciencefestival.org Please come if you can! I’ve got insect stickers!


Then at Porter Square Books http://www.portersquarebooks.com Porter Square Shopping Center, 25 White St., from 3:00-4:00 pm Susan Goodman, John Himmelman, Lita Judge, and I will form a panel speaking on A Life in Books.

I can’t wait to drive along Route 2 and see the flowing river and forsythia and fruit trees in bloom. I hope to meet some deeply enthusiastic young paleontologists who can name more types of dinosaurs than I’ve ever heard of.

NEW

Have you ever read a book to a small one you loved that made you squirm? Did you re-shelve that book, or hide it? Talk with the child about what made you grit your teeth?

In a class I teach at UMass, one student just did a presentation about Babar, not as an innocent elephant in green suit and spiffy shoes and hat, but as emblem of empire, a pawn for one country trying to take over another. She based her talk on others’ research, and most of her points have been made before, but they were new to the students in the class. Babar’s mother gets shot by a white hunter, but as we zip to the next page, all is forgiven, and he meets a rich white lady in Paris who gives him clothes and an education. Soon Babar is back in the forest, bringing back chests and trunks and doling out clothes, which other elephants don and then walk on two legs instead of four. Besides the western-ways-are-good, Africa-is-backwards theme, there’s sexism as seen by Babar being named king then choosing Celeste as wife: she never gets a say. After the talk, a student who grew up in Ghana wrote that he was horrified that such things were read to children. His voice, of course, went a long way with me.

After the presentation, another student wrote that she wondered whether being read Babar as a child had made her as materialistic as she is today. Let me say, this is a lovely young woman who gave her report on ways people are trying to balance ecology with the economy in Kenya. I can’t quite believe there’s such cause and effect, and I’m not convinced that being a mouthpiece for colonialism was the intent of Jean or his son Laurent DeBrunhoff.

But if one reader is going to feel a decent way of life is being undermined by a story, well, there are a lot of other books to read.

In other let’s-shatter-your-pretty-memory moments, (endemic to teaching children’s lit, though that’s not the subject of this class) another student reported on animal stereotypes in Disney’s Lion King. Some of the focus was on hyenas; Laurence Frank . a wildlife biologist and some who worked with him were asked to assist the animators. When they begged for hyenas not to be the villains, but to be shown more realistically, as predators who clean up messes lions make, for instance, they were told that the characters were already written, sorry, but please just let us know how they look and move.

My online pal Becky Levine beckylevine, who is as crazy about researching history as I am, tagged me for a meme. Instructions are to:


1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people and post a comment to beckylevine 's blog (your tagees will post to mine, etc.) once you've posted your three sentences.

Probably I’ll do something messed-up here. No, surely I will. But I’m picking up Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl which has been near by elbow far too long. My daughter, who passed it along to me, keeps asking, “Have you read it yet?” Through no fault of the novel, which is a page-turner, my progress has been glacial. Other library books and books for classes have come and gone. I’m not as enraptured of European history, especially those crazy Tudors, as my daughter is. But I would recommend the first three pages to anyone who wants to look at a way to begin a novel with lots of tension. Of course not every novel is going to have a neck and an executioner in the second paragraph. But even without that, this novel really doesn’t sag.

And on page 123 (who thinks up these things?) the fifth, sixth, and seventh sentences are:

“Suddenly like a striking snake, she reached out a grabbed my hand in a fierce grip. At once she twisted it behind my back and held me so that I could move neither forward nor backward but only cry out in pain: “Anne! Don’t!”

Mmmn, I think we'd get the mood without the snake simile, but I won’t use that as excuse not to read on. And re my five tagees, I’m going to cheat and just say please please play if you want! I’m a lazy tagger, but you won’t regret reporting in to Becky’s blog beckylevine because she always has something fascinating to say (and she will hopefully forgive this cheating.)

I recently enjoyed lunch with a few other writers, and got caught in the whirlwind of all our beautiful uncertainties. Most in the midst of writing new books, or waiting to hear from important people in cities, one waiting for her book to hit the shelves soon, and some of us awash in all of the varieties of creating, waiting, and selling that make up our world. We talked about our editors and our dogs, charms and imperfections.

I love the gossip, celebrating the hard-won victories and commiserating about the struggles. But of course it’s not where the work comes from. Now I give my dogs leftover lemon bread to keep it out of my own mouth and try to make my way back to the kind of silence where something entirely new arises. Sitting on the porch – yay! at last! – I cross the Atlantic in my mind. The weather turns hotter as I move back almost 3000 years in time. Become a Sumerian princess who slips off her sandals, picks up a stylus and clay tablet, contemplates the Moon, and maybe isn’t entirely different from teens we know now as she deals with a mother who sends her across the known world.

Today I met with some students offering me and each other fragile early-ish drafts of stories. There were some fabulous sentences, great ideas, and well wrought scenes, but what most touched me today were the breaks in voices, the sentences that backtracked as students spoke of their writing, and the soft frustration with what didn’t work. I think their tenderness toward their work’s still-in-the-womb state made me feel, more than any vigor or sensitivity in their prose, that these students may be writers to watch out for. They could spot flaws before anyone else did. I’m not a big fan of people apologizing for their prose or rhymes, but their apologies didn’t seem to be about embarrassment. They bent over their work the way you’d lean over a kitten, a puppy, a young animal you knew was going to grow. We watch for what we love, we watch for what may cause trouble, we watch for what this young animal may need.

The students reassured each other more than criticized. Some things got fixed and some were left. Be patient, wait, some solutions come when you’re not looking. And now I’m back to leaning over my own work, trying to keep my eyes wide open, too.

I grew up reading The Moffat family series by Eleanor Estes, but read her Newbery Honor (1944) The Hundred Dresses first as an adult. It’s a slim book that I’d recommend to Jama Rattigan jamarattigan who’s celebrating April with cups of tea: here’s a book you can actually read over a cup, so put aside James’s Portrait of a Lady! The Hundred Dresses has tender illustrations by Louis Slobodkin, a sculptor who started illustrating children’s books after marrying a children’s book author. He was also friends with Estes, who grew up in a big family in West Haven, CT, cared for by a widowed mother. Eleanor Estes worked in libraries until tuberculosis forced her to stay home. She found time then to write and launched her career.

Her one child wrote an introduction to the more recent editions of The Hundred Dresses. She claims her mother’s inspiration for the book about class, guilt, forgiveness, and what we’d now call mean girls came from her life. A girl was teased, then left town before Eleanor ever had a chance to speak up for her. The Hundred Dresses is told mostly from the point of view of Maddie, a girl who keeps quiet during teasing, feeling her own precarious position. If she speaks up, will the other girls note her clothes are hand-me-downs, too? We see the social hierarchies that get set up within a school: Maddie notes that she’s poor, but at least she has a mother and kids can pronounce her last name, unlike Wanda’s. She tries using silence to feel safe.

The Hundred Dresses ends with questions. We’re not sure whether Wanda forgives or of the extent of the guilt of those who hurt her. Some students wished for a clearer declaration of right and wrong for readers to take away. Others argued that ambiguity is the lesson. How often do we wonder what became of others who may have been hurt by our words or silences? How often may our own unresolved guilt change us more than a lesson spelled out or a punishment from outside? And one student noted that the book says that seeking forgiveness is never too late. Isn’t that what the author did?

A hazard of teaching children’s literature is facing students’ slumped shoulders after they reread a book they once loved and feel it didn’t measure up to their memories. I try to assure that critique can be another form of love. The world isn’t really divided between those who love fairy tales, for instance, and those who despise them; you can still love them, and see elements that as an adult you’d want to change. The world isn’t divided, as some feel, between the good guys who are crazy about Harry Potter and those that sneer at the heroic orphan. There are people who adore the series, but can still point to some flaws in the writing. It’s not about finding middle ground, I don’t think, but about embracing stories while calling everything you’ve learned about plot, prose, and human behavior over the years.

One student felt she returned to Oz to find it lacking, and she felt the same disappointment re The Secret Garden. “It’s the writing, really,” she said, explaining she thought the prose of Este’s One Hundred Dresses and Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia finer. Of course Frances Hogdson Burnett came from a tradition of writing big and fast – she produced dozens of books, plays, and stories. Since the modernists of the 1920s, we tend more to an aesthetic in which sentences, paragraphs, and pages are pruned. While I might not want to change a word of Charlotte’s Web, it’s probably largely because E.B.White already did that. He wrote at least eight seriously studied and changed drafts. In the late 1800s, Burnett wrote in a white heat and didn’t look back much.

Yet so much is there. We looked at the Garden of Eden motifs – the jealousy, the eating: the views of imperialism – the Rajah Colin running an empire of servants from his bedroom; the nature imagery, including Dickon as Pan and whether it made a difference that the robin was male. Hey, it’s an English class. But my bet is what they’ll remember is their professor sniffling and dabbing her eyes as I discuss the end of the book. When Mary, Colin, and his father stand together in the garden that nobody cared for, but is cared for now.

Here are a few sentences from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden that remind me it wasn’t published recently. We start the novel: “When Mary Lenox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle, everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too.” Wouldn’t most editors – the editor in me – want to tell the narrator to keep out, and if you must comment, be nice. “Disagreeable” is so subjective. But Mary goes on to be not only not pretty, but bossy and spoiled, and don’t we love to watch her have a bratty fit.

Another chapter begins: “One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live for ever and ever and ever.” The last phrase if often repeated, and in addition to this omniscient narrator’s mysticism, Colin often lectures on Magic, explaining how one can achieve this. Again that inner editor says: you can’t talk about eternal life, sweetheart. (And was it really okay to kill off the parents in the first few pages, with cholera, a really nasty disease?) Yet I love a book that takes such chances. I read on in some kind of awe, and think if we can get philosophical sidetracks in Moby Dick, War and Peace, and Middlemarch, why not in a book about children in a garden? I have some problems with the mother of Dickon and eleven, at last count, other children being so perpetually wise and cheery and energetic, but mostly I’m happy to listen to Susan Sowerby’s lectures, too. The world is an orange, she says, meant to be split and shared.

Point of view keeps shifting, in the way of bulky 19th century books, but the only place it bothers me is at the end, when Colin and his father bump Mary from the center. The book is about message as much as character. The metaphors don’t seem especially subtle. But The Secret Garden is one of my favorite books forever and ever and ever.

Am I so uncritical because this book came from another century? Or am I, and others, simply hungry for messages about self-determination and universal love that don’t always make it to the bookstores in contemporary novels?

I just read an essay in Alison Lurie’s collection Don’t Tell the Grownups, in which she comments that children’s book writers don’t necessarily write from happy childhoods or unhappy ones, but very often from happy childhoods that were suddenly broken. She mentions J. R.R. Tolkien’s loss of his father as a small child and his move from South Africa to England. His mother died when he was about twelve, as did C.S. Lewis’s mother. The grieving boy was sent off to boarding school, an experience Lewis said was worse than fighting in the first world war. After the death of his mother, Kenneth Grahame, author of The Wind in the Willows, was sent from Scotland to England to live with his grandparents. The river behind the house was his one pleasure. Like Tolkien, Frances Hogsden Burnett lost her father when young and she moved from one continent to another, in her case, from England to the U.S. For the rest of her life, Frances Hodgson Burnett moved between those countries, and her characters, too, are often displaced, looking for a home, or making one, as in a secret garden. Louisa May Alcott, who wrote so lovingly of one happy home, moved about sixteen times in the first sixteen years of her life. And closer to our time, Katherine Paterson spent early years in Asia, where her parents were missionaries, before coming to the United States.

This theory of brokenness shaping writers, like most theories, may have as many exceptions as rules. Lewis Carroll, for instance, joyfully grew up among lots of brothers and sisters, acting out in family plays and writing family newsletters, which were admired by a father who was crazy about nonsense. They stayed in one big comfortable house and nobody died too terribly before their time. Beatrix Potter spent most of her childhood in one house she rarely left. But whatever strength this broken-childhood theory has or doesn’t have, it nudges me to look for the roots of creativity in my own life.

When people ask me how I came to write for children, I think about falling in love with the books I was reading to my daughter when she was little. I laughed, wept, and often felt more engaged than I had with many of the books I’d been reading through and since college. I loved the simplicity in some picture books, the swift circling from a beginning to end; the warmth and heroism in Laura Ingalls Wilder, the magic of the Chronicles of Narnia. Eventually I thought beyond This is good to Can I do this -- or something like it?

I think of this love for the literature as what lured me to write for children, but behind the hope and upturning endings, were times of plain old sadness. I can’t think of one broken year that shaped me, but life as I know it sometimes splits or splinters. Writing is often my reply to loss, or putting together what I feel should be whole. Stories fill in empty spaces as we patch what was with what should have been and make something entirely new.

A few days ago, Becky Levine beckylevine posted about the need for writers of both nonfiction and fiction to love their subjects, and as usual, she made me think. In trying to move someone in and out of difficult situations, can we lose track of that falling in love feeling we had when a character, real or imagined, first grabbed us by the collar?

I’ve never written about someone I didn’t love. I’m a slow writer, and I don’t want to spend a lot of time hanging around someone I don’t like. Of course this poses problems. There’s a place for rough and wily antagonists, bullies, mean girls, dragons, hard core villains. And I try to note when my love for my character feels too protective or maternal. I don’t want this character to go off in the woods alone! She must not only listen to, but take my wise advice! Stop, look, listen – to me!

Wrong. Better to let the girl wander in the woods. Better to let her muddle through, make mistakes. The meddling mom has little place at my writer’s desk.

But love? Yes. The kind I’m trying to learn. Being there, but backing off when the time is right for her to venture out, mess up, crash and burn, fulfill a destiny of her own.

In my research about ancient Sumer (um, for those who are still with me) a story keeps coming back to me that seems to have little to do with my plot. Sometimes these nagging, perhaps extraneous stories get tucked in crowded drawers of cast-offs. Once in while, I pull them out and find them a new place. But this story has tagged along through a few drafts, though I keep swatting it back to my notes file, where there’s a hodgepodge of details that might creep in, some perhaps-dialog, and a few other things. I know if I want to use this little story, small enough to fit in a few lines, it’s got to mean something, and I think it’s nudging is telling me it can swell into the theme.

I can’t slip in a story just because I think it’s cool. I have to let it nudge against the plot, and maybe turn things a new way, wilder and bigger than I’d planned. It’s scary to give into the nudging. This thing keeps growing! Like setting a new color in a quilt, I might have to expand the whole, add other colors to balance. It’s more work. But the hope is for a brighter, better, bigger quilt or book.

My teaching schedule is light, but a week break still gave me a lot of great writing time, ending with Easter dinner yesterday. It was lovely to have my daughter here, two couples, and a dad with three teens who are well-read runners and have come since the days of egg hunts. We filled two tables pushed together, I asked my friend Jess to say a short prayer. We closed our eyes and there was silence until her husband said, “Out loud.”
“I’m thinking,” Jess said. More silence, then she began, “Since there are people here of all different beliefs, I’ll begin: to whom it may concern.” Then thanks for the pleasures of being together and a request for silent wishes for those less fortunate before we ate chicken, asparagus, potatoes, and coconut cake.

Once everyone went back home I set about finishing Alice in Wonderland, then wrote an email to my older sister telling her that I still didn’t like it much though she probably did. That was sort of our pattern. She emailed back that she remembered me being disturbed and in hindsight maybe I was right. Maybe I was right? Yes, this is better than chocolate bunnies! As I read I cringed as I remember cringing as a girl when the Duchess throws the crying baby across a room. But I know there are lots of intellectual fans. I pumped up the students beforehand about the sorts of wordplay, varieties of nonsense, playing with time and theories of evolution that go on. A student asked if the author was on narcotics. There doesn’t seem evidence of that, I replied, but reading the thing I bet my students were rolling their eyes thinking: right. It was hard for even me to believe when Alice is talking to a caterpillar smoking a hookah and nibbling mushrooms.

I’m working on historical fiction now, and like most of my writing, this involves a lot of research. Like most people who write in this genre, I love the research part. Reading, reading, reading, one book leading to another, what’s not to like? Because fact or detail findng is so compelling to me, I pretty much follow the research/writing time rule I set when I began the first book I published – a picture book, AANI AND THE TREE HUGGERS, set in 1970s India – which was written when my daughter started school. During the quiet time while she was gone, I wrote. After she came home from school, often with a friend, if I found time I do the research. And some books went to bed with me.

I find my research-after-three p.m. rule still works, though there’s no longer an 8-to-3 routine in our house. My brain is about as fresh as it will get in the morning, so it’s best to write then. And reading after tea time, when my brain is slower, works. I don’t have to read on full alert as I don’t need every detail, but just the ones vivid enough to bust through the fog. And since I’ve spent the morning with my characters I know what they might need to know, so I’m reading for some answers. The thread of my work is with me as I read, and sometimes changes shape. In that case, I write. I don’t have a no-writing-after-3 p.m. rule. It’s just that I don’t have to.

Of course each day has its own pattern and it’s rarely a tabula rasa one as I fit in other duties. But this is the pattern that works for me.