The Best Thing Ever

To say I love to read is such an understatement. Books, stories, literature, have been my way into the world.  I honestly don't know who I would have become without the books in my life.  Possibly something not so good, because the written word has been such an outlet for me.  There's a great passage in Maria Semple's latest novel, Where'd You Go, Bernadette?" where the protagonist is advised to continue with her creative pursuits, because if she doesn't she's likely to become a menace to society.

Yup.

My love/passion/need for books informed my parenting. I held picture books before my newborn's still-unfocused eyes, before he had the strength to hold his own head upright.  It was a big, big moment in our home when we were reading Chicka Chicka Boom Boom to him for the millionth time and asked him to point to the picture of the moon and he actually raised his chubby infant finger and planted it on the round, gold orb on the page. (His sister insists this was merely a coincidence and we have been over-praising his minor achievements for far too long, but that's a blog post for another day ... )  The best moments of my life have been spent with my childrens' warm bodies tucked in close to me while we read together.

So the notion of a child without a book pains me, literally.  The idea that a child might never know the joy of owning his or her personal book is so sad.  The excitement I see on childrens' faces when they hold their own books is deeply moving.

This week, two special authors have brought my attention to efforts to bring books and children together.  This is great work, this is life-changing, and I share it with you here.  Pass it on, support them if you can:

Middle-grade author, Donna Gephart (her most recent book is Olivia Bean, Trivia Queen) recently participated in the "Kids in Need - Books in Deed" program, which purchases books for children and brings writers into their schools. What a gift: not only to have one of Donna's laugh-out-loud books in hand, but to actually meet her!

Another middle-grade author, Lynda Mullaly Hunt (author of One for the Murphys) identified, while she was researching her novel, that foster kids often never own their own books.  She's created a website which brings new books and social workers together, so that the social workers can choose books for their clients and give them out ... free to the kids. It's called the Book Train, and is just "leaving the station," so to speak.

In future posts here, I'll share with you the books I'm donating to Book Train.  This week, I'm mailing off a new copy of the Newbery winner, The One and Only Ivan, by Katherine Applegate.  In case you haven't read it yet, it's a beautiful story.

I like to imagine some child snuggling into bed with it ...

Spying on Writers

For a month, I’ve retreated to a slower rhythm.

We’ve rented a place on an island in Florida, and while we’re still working (thanks to the Internet/personal computers/WiFi) we look up from our screens to watch low-flying squadrons of pelicans, or take “study breaks” to bicycle to the grocery store for the very necessary limes and avocados.

I confess: I’m not getting as much done as I would have at home, where the latest snowstorm would have definitely kept me more securely fastened to the desk near the lovely woodstove in my office.  I’m learning that cold is a better inducement to work than palm trees.  But I have been getting a little help from some good old fashioned peer pressure:  namely, the writer across the lake.

Every morning, when I get up at what I perceive is the “crack of dawn,” his light already shines brightly from his kitchen and casts an arrowed reflection across the lake at our house.  Ringed by cottages and trees that don’t grow in Maine, it’s a little lake, and you can easily see your neighbors.  That’s how I know he’s a “he,” and a writer.  I can see him sitting at a long table as he holds a pen/pencil and occasionally turns pages.  Plus, this island is infested with writers.  I only just learned that RandyWayne White, of the “Doc Ford” series, lives in this neighborhood (although this guy isn’t him.)

Granted, maybe the guy across the lake is reading the Miami Herald and doing the crossword, but I live by imagination so bear with me.  And if you’re wondering just how close these houses are and how a woman who can’t make out the directions on the pasta box without her reading glasses can see into her neighbor’s kitchen I’ll just confess again:  I took out the binoculars one morning.  I mean, if it’s okay to zoom in close to the herons and osprey and cormorants that populate the lake, why not the humans?  And yes, I would get more done on these new chapters I promised my agent if I spent more time writing and less time spying.  But I want to know:  who IS this person up before the light every single day?

My advisor in college, a poet, once revealed to our class that in order to get any writing done he was always at his desk at home by five a.m.  This guaranteed him a solid couple of hours of uninterrupted, quiet creativity before the maelstrom of young children and breakfast and packed lunches and heading out the door to begin his “workday” as a professor.

When you’re a 21 year old student, the idea of being at your desk, ready to work by 5:00 a.m., seems nightmarish.  Isn’t that still “night?”  It must be, since you only just went to bed two hours earlier ….  Why would anyone inflict that on themselves?

This image … of my advisor, padding about his silent, dark house in stocking feet so as not to wake anyone, brewing coffee, filling pages at a desk illuminated by a single lamp … stayed with me.  Possibly more than the advice on crafting sentences.  It spoke to commitment.  To a strange, near-obsessive need to fill pages, tell stories, make things up.  Willing to sacrifice sleep and salary (because except for the handful of bestselling authors, this DOESN’T make us rich) and endure criticism from strangers.

Sometimes, in the dark before first light, as I wait for the coffee to finish brewing and then for the caffeine to kick in, I don’t, I really don’t, want to open the file for wherever I left off the previous day.  Sometimes the words I labored over for hours clang upon rereading and I’m deeply, seriously discouraged and not at all confident that I can pull off another paragraph, let alone another book.

But then I look up and see someone’s else’s lamp burn, and it reminds me that doing this requires simply doing it.  String a few words together, fill one page, then another.  Return to the desk tomorrow.

Like the guy across the lake.

Okay.  Back to work.

Never Compete With a Blind Raccoon

So with a brand new novel released last month, I’ve been scheduling “events” and signing books.  You do that, with a book just out.   Visit a few bookstores, attend a few readings and parties and scribble your name on the title page and thank everyone (quite sincerely, as a matter of fact) not only for showing up but also for shelling out for a hardcover copy.  It is truly amazing how grateful you feel when you see people … some who aren’t even your mother’s friends … fill the chairs at a reading or line up to purchase an autographed book.   You want to hug them all and invite them home for dinner.

In the years when I have a new novel out,  I gratefully accept invitations to sign books and speak on panels and visit schools and Skype … that sort of thing.  The reality of the writing business is that it’s not enough to simply create a book and let your publisher do all the promoting:  you have to be willing to put some energy into selling the work, too.

Of course, there are productive and not-so-productive uses of your time, and while I’m definitely no expert, this is my third go-round with all this and I do have one important piece of advice for newcomers to Authorhood.

Never compete with a blind raccoon.

I saw someone try. You don’t want to go there.

It happened just the other day, at Bailey’s Grocery Store on Sanibel Island, Florida.  Bailey’s is one of those lovely local institutions which has been here forever and has this wonderful tradition of hosting local authors.  On any given day when you pop in to pick up a key lime pie or some fresh shrimp, there’s a table set up near the entrance, between the grocery carts and the display of freshly baked coffee cakes, where a hopeful novelist/artist/memoirist sits, surrounded by copies of his or her newly minted novel/memoir/picture book, signing pen at the ready. 

It’s a tough gig.  People have certain expectations when they enter a grocery store.  They’re thinking about dinner and whether they’re out of toilet paper at home.  They’re not on a literary quest.  They’re not necessarily in the mood to make conversation … let alone eye contact … with some random writer peddling her work.  If you decide to do the author thing at Bailey’s, you have to be prepared to smile brightly at a lot of people who will walk right on by.  You can’t appear overly eager and grasping when someone pauses to ask if you’re selling Girl Scout Cookies.

Of course, all that changes if you bring a fuzzy animal.  Then, you can guarantee a mob.  That’s what I witnessed at Bailey’s the other day, when I wandered in for limes and had to navigate around a crowd of oohing cooing women and girls.

When I pushed in closer to get a look, I saw a woman holding the most adorable little raccoon.  He had his eyes closed, and was contentedly snuggled in her lap, which, if you know what absolute fiends raccoons can be, was a miracle.  He was, she explained, the hero of her picture book (displayed on the table behind her) and had been blinded when someone hit him with a golf club.  She subsequently rescued him, wrote a picture book about him, and the story had just won a Florida state award for children’s non-fiction writing.  His name was Trouper.

I no longer have children of picture book age, yet I almost bought a copy; that’s how cute the little fella was.  I was in a hurry, yet I lingered, and longed to pet him.  What a champ!  What a “poster child” for the importance of kindness to animals!

And, of course, the writer in me couldn’t help but notice: what a genius idea!  Cute, fuzzy animal.  I would have to get one for my next signing.  Once I wrote a book about a cute, fuzzy animal ….

I spent so much time admiring Trouper, that now I was late.  As I sped off toward the produce I noticed something:  another author, on the opposite side of the baked goods display.  He was dressed island-author-smart-casual, with light stone khakis, sandals, and a bright print shirt.  He had neatly stacked copies of his books … murder mysteries set on Sanibel … and even a professional looking poster.  He paced, restless as a lion, behind the table where his work was displayed. 

Not one single person approached him.  Not even me, and I understood his agony all too well.  Usually I stop by author tables, even when I have less-than-zero interest in the book, just to chat.  I'm also one of those people who search for friends' book in stores, and turn them, cover side facing, on the shelves.  But on that day, in a hurry, I didn't pause for the island author.  I know: shame on me.

But what folly!  Had he known?  Had anyone thought to tell him that he would be going toe to toe with Trouper, the most adorable disabled raccoon in the Sunshine State?  Maybe he thought (in error) that the crowds drawn to Trouper might result in some traffic at his table?  Just the opposite occurred.  They used up their limited energy for grocery store authors with Trouper, then sped off to buy food.

Here’s what I’ve learned about signings:  unless you’re fairly well known and can draw a crowd, or bring a fuzzy animal, only schedule signings where you live, where your mother lives, and where your sister lives.  There, at least, they can coerce their friends to show up, and you can count on mom to buy a carton of books.

If you decide to go ahead and put yourself out there anyway, at random venues where you can’t guarantee an interested audience?  Well … you might want to keep a stash of Girl Scout Cookies handy.  Just in case.

Trouper’s story is real, and you can read more about him HERE

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.