Tough Enough

It’s time for me to tell this story.

When my first novel came out five years ago, my publisher, Random House, hosted a lovely reception at the ALA Midwinter Conference in Philadelphia to toast several of us “debut” children’s authors.  It was in a large, elegant hotel room and there were crab cakes and one of those large wheels of runny brie similar to the type Anne Lamott describes in the chapter on “Publishing” in Bird by Bird.  Editors, agents, publishing poo-bahs, writers: all were there. 

It was one of those platinum moments when one feels very good about oneself, professionally.

At some point in the evening I was introduced to a woman, and when my eyes lit on her name tag I almost gasped.  Let’s call her SA.  For Snarky Agent.

Several years earlier when I was searching for agents I had sent her a draft of a manuscript (which ultimately became the debut novel we were all toasting that evening) which she swiftly and rudely rejected.  Very rudely rejected.  As a matter of fact, it was the only rejection I had ever received which made me cry.  It was mean spirited.  It was unnecessarily unkind.  It was unnecessary on all levels, because she was, and is, a very successful agent with a stable of very successful authors.

And that evening, there she was, sidling up to me for an opportunity to schmooze and lavish praise on my little book.

You dream about these sorts of moments.  Not every day, but on those bitter days, those chew-the-gristle-of-past-hurts days, you imagine what you’ll say to so-and-so who did you wrong.  You’ll wield your triumphs in her face.  You’ll trumpet your success.  “The best revenge is doing well!” you’ll cry, as you breach the walls of past disappointment and vanquish your enemy.

And oh, reader, how she asked for it.  She looked at my name tag, and a curious expression came over her face.

“Haven’t we met?” she half-asked, half-mused.  She knew the name, but from where … ?  It never occurred to her it was from her “slush pile.”

Here’s what I did:  nothing. 

“No, I don’t think we’ve met,” I answered, and exchanged some stupid small talk with her before retreating back to the brie.

Here’s why I did it, and it’s not because I’m noble, because I’m definitely not:  because that’s the business.  It’s an opinion-based, subjective business, and even if you win the Nobel Prize, someone out there is gonna shrug and say, “Oh, I really can’t get into his/her novels.”  Someone will take issue with your narrator while someone else loves your narrator.  Some will call your book “important,” while someone else will call it a missed opportunity.

In the midst of that lovely, praise-filled party, I was reminded, before I became dangerously pleased with myself, that there’s always another opinion.  And while you can’t let the turkeys get you down, you also can’t let the voices of the angels go to your head. 

In the end, it’s just about the work.  About being alone with your story, and doing the best you can, and if you string a couple of good sentences together that’s a productive day.  If someone reads it and likes it, that’s a good day. 

My third book is set for release next week, and the reviews are streaming in.  I’m grateful to have a wonderful editor at Knopf/Random House and a wonderful agent.  I’m grateful to be reviewed, grateful for the good reviews… and deeply miffed by the brain-addled idiots who missed the point and wrote bad ones. (See?  I told you I’m not noble.  Or mature.)

My teacher in college and at Bread Loaf, the poet Robert Pack, asked me long ago, “Are you tough enough to make it in this business?” 

Thirty years later, I’d have to tell him:  nope.  Thin-skinned as ever.  Sensitive as ever.

But every day, I return to the blank page.  The hours alone, the stiff back from sitting too long, stringing sentences together.  And strangely enough, I find that deeply satisfying.

Anniversary

Today is the 10th anniversary of the "Many and One" rally in Lewiston, Maine.  It's brilliantly sunny this morning, like that day.  With one big difference.

I remember cold.  Scary cold.  The type that makes you wonder if you’ve made a critical, frostbite-causing mistake by choosing the thin cotton gloves instead of the thick ski mittens.

Standing outside in the long, straggling line of people wrapped around the auditorium on the Bates College campus the afternoon of January 11, 2003, I worried about frostbite not only to my fingers and toes but to my kids, ages 10 and 9.  What were we thinking? I wondered to myself.  They’re going to freeze out here, and for what?  Do they really get it?

But how could we not bring them?  This was the “Many and One” rally, an enormous community effort to respond to thinly veiled threats and hate speech that had been directed at Lewiston’s Somali community by members of a national white supremacist group, the World Church of the Creator.  This was the result of the Mayor of Lewiston’s letter in the local paper, asking the Somali newcomers to “exercise some discipline” and tell their friends and relatives to stay away because Lewiston was “maxed-out.”  This was the response of the people of Maine to hatred and bigotry, the land of Joshua Chamberlain and Harriet Beecher Stowe speaking out against those haters “from away.”

This was turning out to the largest police action in the state’s history.  I’d never seen so many cops.

But the kids seemed completely unaware of the cold, the armed presence, and the “politics” which had led to our attendance that day.  They were having too much fun playing with their friends in the snow outside the auditorium.

Eventually, the long line snaked forward, and we found seats in the cavernous auditorium.  We were lucky: about 1000 people had to remain outside when the fire code limits were met.  Sound from within was piped out and hot chocolate was served and … wow.  Those people stayed.  In that bitter cold, they remained outside in order to hear what was said, in order to simply be present.

For the life of me, I can’t remember specifics about the speeches made that afternoon. There were a lot of elected officials.  There was chanting, people asking Where’s the Mayor? Because he wasn’t present.  There was serious applause when young people from the community, Somali youth, stood in front of that crowd and spoke into a microphone in a language not yet their own.  Most of all, there was a sense of wonder that permeated the whole setting.  Strangers kept looking at each other and grinning and saying, “Can you believe this?  Can you get over this crowd?”

It was a good day to be from Maine. 

My kids tell me they remember the big snow piles outside the auditorium that day.  I’m content that when they hear or read about the “Many and One” rally in the future, they’ll be content that their parents made sure they were there.

Of course, on the other side of town, at the armory, there was a very different sort of rally going on that day.  Members of the World Church of the Creator held forth there, and writer Crash Barry managed to “crash” that assembly and get a close look at those folks and what was said.  I post it here, for contrast:

http://crashbarry.com/the_crash_report/among_racists/

Tonight, at the Lewiston Public Library, there’s a gathering to celebrate the 10^th anniversary of the rally. It promises to be a balmy 25 degrees.  I don’t believe any police presence is required. 

What a difference a decade makes.

Maria Padian’s next novel, “Out of Nowhere,” due out from Random House on February 13, 2013, was inspired by events in Lewiston ten years ago.  It is the story of the friendship that develops between a white boy from Lewiston and a Somali refugee boy who both play on the same high school soccer team.

Strike a Match

Until you’ve had a mentally ill child, you can’t understand the isolation and fear and sadness that the parents of the mentally ill endure.

We all know the saying, “The Buck Stops Here.”  Well, that’s parenting.  And all the it-takes-a-village rhetoric is very nice indeed, and in many ways true, but the village can only do so much.  The village of neighbors and teachers and friends and health care professionals can only do so much.  Because at the end of the day, the parent is the one who tucks that child into bed at night … or wrests the sharp nail scissors from his hands at bath time when he suddenly and unexpectedly threatens to injure himself or, worse, his siblings.

While the rest of the “village” sleeps, the parent stares, dreamless and panicky, into the dark and begs the god who created this child to help him, help her, help all of us understand what’s going on ….

One very brave parent, Liza Long, has written an essay called “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother,” about her struggle raising a mentally ill son. It’s gone viral, and sparked countless comments, and hopefully will move us forward in the conversation not only about violence in our society but about mental illness:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/16/i-am-adam-lanzas-mother-mental-illness-conversation_n_2311009.html?utm_hp_ref=email_share

“She’s describing our lives,” one woman commented to me, when we discussed this essay.  “No one understands what this is like.”

“It’s like groping in a dark tunnel with no lights,” another woman once described to me, about their frustrating, heart-wrenching journey toward a “diagnosis” which would explain their young son’s antisocial behaviors.  An entire “village” of professionals tried to help, but ultimately, they could always walk away at the end of the day and go back to their own warm suppers and not-nearly-so-dysfunctional lives, because treating this child was, for them, a job.

But for the parents of the mentally ill, it’s day in, day out, and all night.

One line in Long’s essay really struck me:  “You’ll do anything for [health] benefits.”  Families of the mentally ill know exactly how profound that statement is.  Because health benefits are the keys which unlock the gates to the “village.”  Treating mental illness is staggeringly expensive, and most families cannot begin to pay out-of-pocket for treatment.  And without treatment … meaning doctors, evaluations, therapy, possibly medication …  there truly is no hope for a mentally ill child.  They don’t “outgrow” this stuff.

I know that many advocates for the mentally ill have been angered by Long’s essay, and feel she’s stigmatized her son by writing this.  But I’ve got news for them:  the stigma is already out there.  We see it in the unfair, and dangerous suggestion floating in the news that Adam Lanza might have shot twenty innocent children because he possibly had Asperger’s (which has been described as a mild form of Autism.) 

People with Asperger’s are not sociopaths.  The New York Times had a good column about this today:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/18/opinion/dont-blame-autism-for-newtown.html?emc=eta1&_r=0

We need to shed light on the reality of mental illness, and Liza Long has struck one solitary match in the dark tunnel.  And found, I believe, that she wasn’t in there alone.

Stuff My Mother Says

I’ve been thinking about why kids read.  Actually, why some kids read … a lot … and some kids don’t.  

In the New York Times on Thursday (12/6) there was an article about how even though Latino students make up 25 percent of the school population in the U.S., Latino characters in children’s books are markedly absent.  And the “experts” say that’s a problem.

“Education experts and teachers who work with large Latino populations say that the lack of familiar images could be an obstacle as young readers work to build stamina and deepen their understanding of story elements like character,” the article asserts.

(for the full article, see http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/05/education/young-latino-students-dont-see-themselves-in-books.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

This got me thinking, not only because I write for young people (teens, not little kids) and did happen to include a Cuban character in one of my books, but also because it made me recall by own bookwormish childhood.  I don’t remember “relating” to the characters.  If anything, I loved being plucked out of my own world and transported to another.  Then again, I grew up in a predominately white, upper middle class town, so maybe that’s why books like “Charlotte’s Web” resonated so deeply with me.  I mean, a white girl is a white girl is a white girl, right?  Even if one lives in Jersey and spends Saturdays cruising the malls on Route 17 and another one lives on a farm and raises a pet pig.  There are certain basic, cultural “things” we just “get.”  It’s like knowing the secret handshake which allows you into the club.

The comments following the Times article were interesting.  One in particular snarkily noted that there are hardly any Asian protagonists in children’s books, but “Who are all the valedictorians in American high schools?  Asians.”

Okay, snarky point taken.  But these were, after all education experts pointing out this problem for young readers.  So I decided to consult my own expert:  a bona fide “Latino.”

This gal grew up in an apartment in New York, in the Bronx.  Spanish was her first language and Spanish was spoken at home.  Her parents did not go to college … actually, her father drove a bus down Riverside Avenue.  She grew up far from the upper middle class world of homes stocked with books and newspapers, weekends playing tennis at the club, adults chatting about their work at “the office.”  Yet she was a voracious reader as a child, and continues to be a lifelong reader and learner.

In other words, I called my mom.

“That’s ridiculous,” she said when I told her about the article.  “I read everything I could get my hands on, and I didn’t care what color the characters were.  I just loved stories.  Kids want a good story.”

“My mother,” she went on, “knew that if we were going to make it in America we had to learn English.  So you know what she got me?  A library card.  And the Encyclopedia Britannica.  This guy came to our door, and he said, ‘Mrs. Morales, with a dollar down and a dollar every month, you can have the encyclopedia right here in your home.’  And she went for it.  I remember my brother and I spending hours on the floor reading the encyclopedia.  It was wonderful.”

When I asked her how she recalls turning me on to reading, she says, “That was easy.  For starters, we were the last people in America to have a color television.  Second, if I saw you laying around I’d say, ‘Either read, or help me clean.’  That got you all reading, let me tell you.”

I remember that.  As long as my nose was in a book, mom left me alone.

I know this issue boils down to more than “get a library card” and “clean your room.”  It’s more complicated than that.  But maybe … not that much more complicated.  Maybe we don’t have to reinvent children’s literature, although having more Latino characters (and I mean authentic characters, not just stick figures celebrating Cinco de Mayo) would certainly benefit all readers, especially kids who don’t know any Latinos.

But maybe there’s something to being the last family in America to have a color television.  I know my kids were the last in our town to have cable.

Recently I was at a gathering in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, which, in case you don’t know Maine, is probably the area with the highest per capita income in the state.  The schools are notoriously good, and when I say “notorious” I mean people talk about how tough the public high school is and how high the expectations are.  Anyway, at this gathering I met a fifth grade teacher who talked about how concerned she is about her students, especially her boys, because they aren’t reading.

“I mean, this is Cape!” she said.  “If they aren’t reading here, what’s up?”

We talked about our own kids, all in college now, and how they cut their teeth on the Harry Potter books.  They grew up with Harry, built their reading stamina on those loooong books (and really, what did they have in common with British wizards, anyway?) then moved on to “The Lord of the Rings,” C.S. Lewis, Dickens ….  

The teacher from Cape said she asked her current students who had read “Harry Potter,” and barely a third raised their hands.  However, when she asked how many had seen the movies, virtually every child had seen every Harry Potter movie.  Multiple times.

When the power goes out, we light candles, sit around the table, and play cards.  Pull out the board games.  Talk and laugh.  When the lights go back on, we retreat to our screens.  Our laptops and iPads and televisions and cell phones. 

Maybe, even if the electricity is on, we should abandon the screens and open our books.  Stretch out on the floor with the Encyclopedia Britannica and criss-cross the globe.  Lift our heads every once in a while to comment to the person across the room, “Hey, listen to this,” and read a few lines out loud.

I think that’s how my mother did it.

Go Blue Devils

‘Tis the season.  Political lawn signs are sprouting, trees are dressed in their seasonal gold, and my neighbor’s chimney is sending out smoke signals.  In the world of high school sports things are coming to a crescendo, as the fall teams wrap up their regular seasons and move into their conference, regional and state finals.  Farmers’ markets are winding down, Halloween decorations are going up.

Who knew it was time to hatch a little hate speech?  But like locusts, which stay underground for years before emerging, angry words have been flying this season in Lewiston, Maine.

You have to wonder if an uncanny ability to stir public outrage is a precondition for the job of mayor there.  Because like his predecessor of a dozen years earlier (Laurier T. Raymond, Jr.) now-mayor Robert Macdonald has single-handedly reignited the fires of resentment and racism in this community thanks to his … dare we say … “inelegant” comments about its minority Somali population.

In a recent BBC documentary about the resettlement of some 6000 Somali refugees to Lewiston over the last ten years, Macdonald said, “You (immigrants) come here, you come and you accept our culture and you leave your culture at the door.”  And in an earlier column on the topic, which he penned for a local newspaper, Macdonald wrote:

“I’m sick of hearing the Somalis don’t feel welcome here.  I’m sick of hearing Lewistonians must understand their culture and make exceptions toward them if their actions clash with American customs and laws. I’m sick of hearing about their lack of employment. I’m sick of hearing about phantom victimization.  But what frosts me the most is these complaints are coming almost exclusively from boo-hoo white do-gooders and their carpetbagger friends.”

Needless to say, white do-gooders have been a bit “frosted” after reading that.  So petitions were signed calling for the mayor’s resignation (hasn’t happened); a small protest was held; folks both black and white and Muslim and Christian asked the mayor to apologize during a hearing at City Hall (he didn’t); and both the national news and the usual racist bloggers have picked up the story.

Meanwhile across town, at Lewiston High School, the boys varsity soccer team led by a front line that includes players called Mohamed Ali and Abdibaari Hersi and Yusuf Yama have been racking up a near-perfect season against their competition in the Kennebec Valley Athletic Conference.  At their games, blond mamas in L.L. Bean jackets cheer on the same side of the field as black mamas in body-masking hijab: “Go Blue Devils!” Theirs is a team that has, over the past decade, steadily improved its record, and fielded rosters that include names like McDonough and Jacques and Abdirahman: a melting pot of players that reflects the Irish-Franco-now-Somali immigrant waves to wash up on Lewiston’s shores.

These boys are too busy practicing together and attending pre-game pasta parties together and worrying about homework and girls and college applications and after-school jobs to get knocked off course by the rhetoric that keeps twisting so many of the adults in this community into knots.

When I wandered into Lewiston several years ago to begin research on my young adult novel, Out of Nowhere, I was struck by this disconnect between the hair-trigger anger reflected in the grownup world, and the live-and-let-live, “Whatever, dude,” attitude of the kids.  True: teenagers are no strangers to hate speech and resentment, and “Go back to Africa!” has been scrawled on the girl’s room wall.  But for the most part, this generation has done a good job of reacting to each other with curiosity and getting on with the business of life.

“They eat goat, I eat bacon,” one boy said to me, shrugging.  He was looking forward to being invited to a post-Ramadan celebration known as Eid, hosted by one of his team members.  The food, he assured me, would be great.  Sambusas in particular.

Maybe it’s because they eat in the same school cafeteria every day, while in the adult world we have to arrange formal cultural events to break bread with strangers.  Maybe it’s because as adults we are segregated not only by neighborhood, but by our educational backgrounds and jobs and our routines and our places of worship, while kids in school walk the same hallways and change in the same locker room and wear the same team jerseys. 

They actually get to know each other.  And that’s when the angry rhetoric begins to sound stupid and beside the point.

Ten years ago, Larry Raymond’s letter to the editor, urging the Somalis to stave off further immigration, brought national media attention crashing down on this community and prompted the biggest police action in the state’s history when the Many and One Coalition held a massive rally the same day as the World Church of the Creator.  I remember that bitterly cold afternoon in January:  all those cops on hand “just in case,” but there was no violence.  It was a good day for Maine.

Today, despite Mayor Macdonald’s seemingly repeated efforts to out-do his predecessor, the controversy seems to have fizzled and the competing headline is the trajectory of this public high school soccer team. 

Go Blue Devils.

Out of Nowhere, a young adult novel set in Maine about the friendship that develops between a Somali boy and a white boy who play on the same high school soccer team, will be published by Knopf Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Random House, in February 2013.

Saying Good-bye and a Poem for a Monday

I’ve had the most amazing conversations lately with, of all people, my mother.

The fact that I speak with my mother is nothing unusual: we’re on good terms, and both tend to be chatty. It’s the nature of the communication that’s extraordinary. One of us … or perhaps both, I can’t tell … has crossed the Rubicon, so to speak, and I find myself in a whole new place with her.  It’s an unexpected joy, and comes at just the right time.

See, my husband and I have just “launched” our youngest child.  Our daughter joined her brother in the ranks of young adults living away from home and attending college, and we are now so-called Empty Nesters.  This has come with the usual amount of flurried activity and stress and angst and unexpected expenditures and bittersweet moments and long hugs … followed by arrival in the now-quiet house where the impatient dog continues to make demands.

Nothing about this transition surprised me, until I called Mom.  Granted, she tends to say surprising things.  Annoying things, actually.  Comments which, in the past have, shall we say, “rubbed me the wrong way.”  For example, when my son was a little guy I remember confessing some ongoing worry I had about him, and after she was done patiently listening to me she summed up the conversation with, “Yup. Kids.  It’s a lifetime sentence.”

Or, how about when that same little boy got his license, and I called her the first time he pulled out of the driveway and drove off, alone.  “I know,” she said.  “I haven’t slept a wink since you got your license.”  “Mom, I’m a 50-year old woman,” I exclaimed, to which she shot back, “Let me tell you: it’s a long time to go without a good night’s sleep.”

Sometimes I ask myself why I continue to telephone my mother at my most vulnerable moments, but what I realize is that the apple has not fallen very far from the tree and, like her, I am a consummate worrier.  Not a “helicopter” parent, mind you.  I’m truly happy to see them pack their bags and take off and live their lives:  I remember that stage myself, and it’s so necessary and exciting and wonderful.  But I worry about safety.  Tractor trailers on I-84 while he’s driving to college. Strangers lurking in dark corners while she’s walking back to her dorm late at night. When they are three years old and holding your hand crossing the street, you can put your body between them and the oncoming vehicle … but not anymore.

Which is something I now share with my mother.  For some reason a huge gulf has closed between us, and I find myself toe-to-toe with a fellow parent who is practicing the art of “letting go and letting God.”  Ironically, I’ve caught up with her, and now we both have adult children who live far from us.  Suddenly, her wry observations about children are rather amusing, and wise, so when we deposited our daughter at college this past week, Mom was my first call.

“Just wait,” she said, after I filled her ear with descriptions of every shade of emotion I had experienced.  “You think it’s hard leaving your kids?  Try leaving your grandkids. You’ll love them like your own, but then you have to leave them with these people who don’t know what they’re doing!”

As the incompetent implicated by that remark I suppose I should have been irritated … but instead I found myself laughing out loud at a moment when I might otherwise have been crying.  And I marveled at my mother’s gift for redirecting me and putting things in perspective.

In all honesty, we didn’t cry as we drove away from our daughter’s college last week, but this poem got me. 

Waving Good-Bye

By Gerald Stern

I wanted to know what it was like before we

had voices and before we had bare fingers and before we

had minds to move us through our actions

and tears to help us over our feelings,

so I drove my daughter through the snow to meet her friend

and filled her car with suitcases and hugged her

as an animal would, pressing my forehead against her,

walking in circles, moaning, touching her cheek,

and turned my head after them as an animal would,

watching helplessly as they drove over the ruts,

her smiling face and her small hand just visible

over the giant pillows and coat hangers

as they made their turn into the empty highway.

Poem for a Monday: Normal

Two weeks ago our town held "Cuba Week," a wonderful exploration of Cuban culture and celebration of the sister city relationship we have with Trinidad, Cuba.  I'll confess that in the past most of my "Cuba Week" participation has been limited to eating black beans and rice at Henry and Marty's Restaurant, but this year I found myself salsa dancing with friends to the rhythms of a great band, and also spent a fine afternoon at The Little Dog Coffee Shop on Maine Street, where the oh-so-irreverent Gary Lawless read Cuban poetry.

This poem is from an out-of-print collection, which you probably couldn't sell in the United States even if it were still in print.  Gary's copy is profoundly dog-eared and yellow, and flaps open loosely to his favorite poems:  a well loved book.  A Velveteen Rabbit of a book.

This poem he read, translated from Spanish, received the loudest applause from the audience.  It made me wish I could dog-whistle.  You know, two fingers in the mouth, eardrum piercing whistle?  It was a good poem for me to hear on that particular day.

How Lucky They Are, The Normal Ones
by Roberto Fernandez Retamar (b. 1930)
(for Antonia Eiriz)
How lucky they are, the normal ones, those peculiar creatures:
The ones who didn't have a crazy mother, a drunk for a father, a delinquent son,
A house nowhere at all, an unknown disease - 
The ones who've worn all the seventeen smiling faces and more,
The ones stuffed with shoes, the cute ones,
The Rin-tin-tins & their secretaries, the ones who "Sure, why not?" this way,
The ones who make money & are loved up to the hilt,
The flautists accompanied by mice,
The hucksters & their clientele,
The gentlemen just a touch superhuman,
The men dressed in thunder & the women dressed in lightning,
The delicate ones, the prudent ones, the ones with taste.
The courteous ones, the sweet ones, the edibles & potables,
How lucky they are, birds & manure
& stones.


Just let them keep out of the way of the others, the ones who make
Worlds & dreams, illusions
& symphonies, words that tear us down
& rebuild us, crazier than their mothers, drunker
Than their fathers, worse delinquents than their sons,
More eaten at by loves more corrosive:
Let them leave these their stations in hell, & forget it.