Jeannine Atkins

What’s the truth in a work of fiction? In a recent piece for Teen Reads http://www.teenreads.com/blog/2009/08/jo-knowles-did-it-happen-to-you.asp, Jo Knowles jbknowles covers the origins of her novels in lived experience, and the ways her struggle to understand people she’s known, including herself, shapes the lives she creates in novels. There’s truth and imagination, which is so much composed of compassion. Jo says it all brilliantly. When readers ask novelists – is this, or any of this true? – some bristle, taking the question as an assault upon their creativity, Kind Jo puts front and center the question that’s so often behind the question: am I alone? So many of us read to feel we aren’t, and are comforted when we read of someone who seems to understand us. We may come to an author hoping that is not an illusion. While honoring the complexity of the creative process, Jo assures us that we’re not forever bound to be misfits.

Relating to truth but from a different angle, I just read a New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/arts/ article by Judith Thurman, who often and deftly profiles remarkable women for this magazine. This one is about Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane. Judith Thurman’s focus is on their relationship, particularly their collaboration as writers, which seems to be mainly Laura providing the material of stories from her hard, brave life, while Rose, who’d already had a long career as a writer, shaped them into the books that would become beloved. Upon hearing of the daughter’s hand in the stories, some feel betrayed. They thought they were all truth. There are still debates about whether the books should be shelved with fiction or nonfiction. Because of the heavy reliance on dialogue and scenes which Laura surely could not remember looking back over fifty years, even before looking at early manuscripts, I considered them fiction based on fact. It’s a twist on the James Frey fiasco: he wrote a novel that his publisher apparently decided would sell better as memoir; it sold fantastically well, at which point much of what he wrote was revealed as not just wild conjecture but lies. I haven’t followed this well, but I believe the book is now being published as fiction.

It’s a long way from tales of addiction and jail stays to the Little Houses, but there’s the same cry in the heart to believe we’re not alone. And also, that ancient perhaps not as pretty cry to feel somebody’s got it worse. Hey I’m not THAT addicted and I may have done a foolish thing or two but I never landed in jail. OR, hey, a job was lost in the family and the weather’s bad, but that winter storm didn’t drop snow seventeen feet high, and we didn’t almost starve because the train didn’t get through. We’ve got problems, but no blights of locusts, hail, drought, or bears lurking outside thin walls.

Stories in the media often pose the moment of revelation, when you find something you thought was true was not, as moments of drama, anger, sheer and cold betrayal. But often I’ve found those moments to be gentle and hushed; the truth falls, and it brings people quietly closer, perhaps after some anguish. In Borrowed Names, my book of poems coming out next spring, I wrote of Laura and Rose and how they worked together; not scheming to keep secrets, but a mother and daughter collaborating at last as best they knew how with pencils, five cent notebooks, and a typewriter, trying to tell a story of hope.

I remember the first time after my daughter was reading on her own, and had left behind most picture books, that I went to the children’s department in the Jones Library and chose a small armful of books. I felt sneaky as I approached the desk. Could I really check these out without a small child at my side, or one waiting at home? It seemed I could. And today this remains one of favorite places. Right up there with lattes for a pick-me-up. The kind librarians ask about my daughter in college as they check out my wide slim books. No explanations, no apologies. Often they’ve read some themselves, and not to their grandchildren.

You might not have the pleasure of a child’s company, but that shouldn’t keep you from the pleasures of picture books. A biographical one often gives me just enough information about someone: I’m not keen on thick biographies that spend the first chapters on ancestors. I recently read The Road to Oz: Twists, Turns, Bumps, and Triumphs in the Life of L. Frank Baum, Kathleen Krull’s http://www.kathleenkrull.com/ picture book biography, and learned something, though I’d read other short biographies of him. I admired the way she structured this book about a man who took some decades to find his calling. Illustrator Kevin Hawkes made the book very very emerald, and put echoes from the author’s childhood rose garden into Oz.



Since I love this genre, (and adding to Becky’s beckylevine lists), another picture book I just read was Before John was a Jazz Giant by Carole Boston Weatherford http://www.caroleweatherford.com/ illustrated by Sean Quails, and which just received a Corretta Scott King Honor from ALA. While Krull, who specializes in amazing biographies (my daughter was raised a bit on The Lives of the Artists, Writers, etc.) works by accumulating fascinating details, this book is short and swingy, a riff, while the afterword I expect has a bigger word count than the text. If you love rhythm you’ll love this book. Here’s page one: “Before John was a jazz giant, he heard steam engines whistling past, Cousin Mary giggling at jitterbuggers, and Bojangles tap-dancing in the picture show.” There’s some music on every page, with words and Sean Quail’s http://altpick.com/spot/alko/index.php whimsical, lively paintings, with bubbles and dashes and zigzags indicating sound.



Aside from learning about people, I like the way picture books offer the pleasure of narrative, the sweep and elegance of a clear beginning, middle and end, and often give the attention to language of poetry. When I taught children’s literature last fall, some of my college students were delighted to discover their library had shelves of books with pictures. Books about mischievous monkeys, well dressed penguins, George,Madeline, Madlenka, Tango, and Angelina Ballerina. One student began to use that section of the library as a place to escape stresses, a fantastic idea. Brevity, brilliance, often humor. What's not to like?

Thank you Becky Levine beckylevine for the review on your blog of Anne Hutchinson’s Way! I blush.

And I’m going to respond to some of the thoughts in your other post today about ways to lure lovers of fiction to enjoy more of what nonfiction can offer. It’s not just your son, Becky, whose allegiance is to certain library shelves. I asked my college students recently about who liked nonfiction, and maybe half an unenthusiastic, polite arm was raised. So many have unhappy memories of textbooks. History seemed fact after fact, not argument and emotion. It seemed that way to me, and sometimes people are surprised, knowing that most of my books draw from the past, that I never took one history course in college. Instead, I learned about history from novels and the background reading I did for them. Those people seemed truly alive.

Now when I write about real people from the past, I use fictional techniques, mainly, inventing dialogue, which I note in an afterword. Anne Hutchinson was famous in her time – or notorious – so those who could write wrote about her. ( Of course some of those recorded views were not my views. Particularly that of Governor Winthrop who didn’t hesitate to say that woman was in league with the devil. So I weigh and interpret).

And even with quite a bit of information, what’s missing is what was said at the kitchen table or at bedtimes. Almost always missing is what the children said and did. We have a transcript of Anne’s trial, but no notes of what her children looked like when they heard her mother would go to jail. I use what’s known as a framework, then imagine my way in. It’s the kind of thing we do with friends: listen well, then take a step past the circumstances to feel our way closer to their hearts.

You can read more about nonfiction on Anastasia Suen's Monday roundup at http://6traits.wordpress.com/2008/02/25/nonfiction-monday-round-up-5/

I am enjoying Linda Lear’s biography of Beatrix Potter, maybe especially because she shows a less devastating take on her childhood than others have reported. Her father, Lear states, shared her interest in art, and really, Beatrix was quite happy with her motley animal companions, and with the London Natural History museum nearby, did she really need formal schooling? There are
snippets from Potter’s early journals (translated from her secret code). I like knowing that Potter thought she came up with her best ideas in chapel services. It’s cool that she discovered and drew a rare pine cone fungus one day before she wrote her famous letter to her former governess’s child, Noel, the picture letter that became Peter Rabbit. I like knowing that her interest in the natural world pretty much stopped at the galaxy. In her journal she mentioned that aside from enjoying a meteor, she didn’t feel the need to pursue a knowledge of the sky and stars. “It is more than enough that there should be forty thousand named and classified funguses.”

But there are too many full days, and, let’s face it, too many boring ones. Linda Lear doesn’t follow the edict that just because she dredged something out from extensive research, it should be reported, but the bulky bio format doesn’t encourage cutting to the chase. I can take a fat biography on vacation, but… thank goodness research has made me good at skimming. I have no problem sliding over draggy sentences. I can sniff a genealogical flashback coming and think: Do I need to know about Potter’s great grandmother? No, thanks.

It’s good to have some kind of fabric to hold the gems together – other than saying “Isn’t that cool” and getting list-like. But limit that day-to-day reportage I like biographers who select material the way a fiction writer choses details: it should be relevant to a theme. That’s why I often prefer biographies written for children, where I often find relevant, fascinating information, and polished prose all between one set of covers. Hey, life is short.

But it's all about audience. Yesterday we had a five year old guest, and my friend asked me to read her Anne Hutchinson's Way, which I knew was too old for her. We started out, me cutting my own words, but it soon moved too me answering her, "Where is the mother?" "Where is the mother now?" In a way that is what the picture book is about. Though I did want to get in a bit about religion and all.