"Getting" #Wrecked at School

My new novel, Wrecked, has been out in world for a couple of weeks now, and I’ve been visiting schools and book stores for signings, readings, discussions, that sort of thing. It’s been a busy but fairly low-key, New England-based “tour.” It’s also my fourth book, and I’m used to speaking in public/signing/reading, so while I was excited to finally share Wrecked, I was fairly nonchalant about the whole thing.

Nevertheless, I was unprepared for the emotional impact of presenting Wrecked to young readers.

I wasn’t prepared for the tears. The stricken expressions and extra beat of silence preceding the requisite claps at readings. I should have expected it. Kids lead with their hearts, so they were never going to read Wrecked with a pencil in hand, underlining salient passages that gave them hints about the characters’ motivations, or how the plot might develop. And the early, online responses should have warned me, because it’s been so emotional: the young bloggers don’t analyze and review the book as much as they emote over the characters. Like they’re real people, and this has really happened.

It’s a storyteller’s greatest wish, to connect with another person and transport him or her temporarily into a different world. But when you take that story on the road and witness the emotion … hell, share the emotion (when those college students in the front row started crying, so did I) … you realize you’re in a new place, a different “stage of development” with your baby, and it brings a whole new set of responsibilities.

Anyway, the tears and stricken expressions was the college visit. Then, there was the high school visit, and wow, we were off to the races. I presented Wrecked to groups of juniors and seniors, roughly half of whom had “consent training” by a group of professionals shortly before my visit.

Where do I even begin to describe this experience? First of all, can I just say I love teenagers and every time I visit a school I’m reminded why I write YA fiction. Second: don’t worry about the state of the world. Spend some time with young people and you’ll feel confident that they are very capable of fixing all the things we’ve messed up. Eventually.

Because these kids were courageous. They were serious. They were honest, engaged and intense. And they were a case study in the difference education about sexual assault and consent can make. After my presentations, I spoke to the teacher and librarian who had attended. We marveled at how easily the students who had had the training understood the difference between “no means no” and affirmative consent, how they recognized and called out slut-shaming, how they “got” the different standard of proof between a criminal trial and a college hearing. The kids without training were just as earnest and honest but way, way less sophisticated and informed. And, ironically: the untrained kids were the seniors. Which means younger, less experienced kids were more savvy than their older peers simply as a result of workshopping these issues.

So here’s the thing: I’m no counselor and I’m no expert on sexual assault. I’m a novelist, and I’ve written a book which is, first and foremost, a story. One of my editors for Wrecked warned me, early in this process, “I’m allergic to bibliotherapy,” and so am I. Our primary goal for Wrecked was to create authentic characters and weave together a compelling story. It’s not meant to be a counseling tool.

But if a story can transport us to a new place, and inspire us, and create empathy then I’m all for it. And here’s what I saw happen with Wrecked: it cracked open important conversations. Edgy, values-laden, honest conversations between girls and boys. And that’s how we’re going to make real change: from the bottom up, one awkward conversation at a time.

All this week I’m going to blog about Getting #Wrecked at School, because it’s going to take me that long to process all that happened and all I learned. Chime in, I’d love to hear what you think, what you know, and what you might suggest as I continue to take this book on the road and share it with young people.

The #1 Most Difficult Question

Here’s the #1 Most Difficult Question I’m asked by teens: Where do you get the ideas for your books?

Maine writer Stephen King has a pretty straightforward answer to that question: “Everywhere.” Now, while that might seem a bit sweeping and not particularly helpful to young, would-be writers (and given the plots to Carrie, Cujo and Christine probably doesn’t warm the hearts of our state tourism officials) it’s spot on. Because here’s the thing: stories come at us from a lot of different directions. My honest response when asked the #1 Question?  “Life, pretty much.”

The trick is focus. Sorting through all the noise of “life” and “everywhere” and following a couple of interesting threads. King picks one or two then asks himself, “What if?” and he’s off to the races with a bestselling novel. For me it’s a little more arduous, especially if the thread feels scary or fraught. Maybe not as scary as killer cars and rabid St. Bernards, but for me, writing realistic young adult fiction? Definitely fraught. And for my latest novel, Wrecked, a story about a sexual assault on a college campus, the Where-did-you-get-THAT-idea? question feels personal. There’s a hint of prurient curiosity behind it. As if what they really want to know is: Did this happen to you? Why would you choose to write about something so awful?

 Is this story true?

For the record: I’m not a victim, and Wrecked is fiction. As for the “Why?” Well …

I could have been that girl. I was almost that girl. The evening started at a frat party where I was dancing with friends and drinking the Mystery Punch (it was delicious.) Next thing you know I’m downtown with a guy I sort of knew (where were my friends?) having more drinks, followed by the long walk back to his dorm room where, as I sat on his bed, I marveled at how the room wasn’t spinning clockwise but rather end to end. Somehow he’d discerned I was a literature buff, so to further woo me he began reading aloud from … no joke … Moby Dick.

That was when I realized this was not at all where I wanted to be, nor with whom, and declared my desire to return to my own room. Pronto. And here’s where I got lucky: I was able to voice that desire and he wasn’t a predator. He walked me back; we said good night. The next morning, I was shocked by how easily, thoughtlessly, I had drifted into that young man’s room. Never before had I considered myself a person without agency or volition. How had I ended up in that situation? The experience branded me with a fresh empathy for any young woman who had started her evening like I had, but encountered a very different guy.

Another thread: years later, I went to see the play “Doubt” on Broadway. It’s set in a Catholic school, and involves a nun’s accusation of sexual misconduct against a priest. I went with friends and was fascinated by their reactions: each came to vastly different conclusions about what “happened.” Some absolutely assigned blame to the priest; others felt the nun misjudged him. Each defended her position passionately, despite the fact that we never saw what took place between the priest and the child. We drew our conclusions from the other side of a closed door.

It occurred to me that one’s truth varies with point-of-view, and that our opinions are informed by biases we might not realize we have. That fascination with how a story changes depending on the narrator has haunted me ever since, and combined with the more recent  threads of having kids in college at a time when so much national debate swirls around issues of sexual assault on campus, new definitions of consent, new federal guidelines, etc., well … Wrecked pretty much insisted on being written.

So here’s how I answer the #1 Most Difficult Question: We get our ideas from the myriad threads we collect. We twist them into a stout rope, then go fishing. We toss that rope overboard, let it sink deep into our imaginations, then haul. It comes up dripping and draped, with seaweed, garbage, shells. Some of it’s trash, some of it’s treasure. But if you keep pulling you eventually get to the end of your rope. 

And there’s the story.

Harriet's Legacy

The newly renovated Stowe House

I've been fascinated by a real estate battle in our town. It seems Bowdoin College is suing a woman in California over the sale of her house.  At issue: a building at 28 College Street, Brunswick, Maine, owned by Arline Pennell Lay. Bowdoin says they made a deal with Ms. Lay ten years ago to buy the property for 125-percent of fair market value. Ms. Lay says the house is worth much more, and has a buyer who will pay her much more. That’s because – according to Lay --- Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin in that house.

We take our history, and our place in it, very seriously in Brunswick. We like to think the Civil War began and ended here: sparked by Uncle Tom’s Cabin and effectively concluded when the 20^th Maine, led by our very own Joshua Chamberlain, fixed bayonets at Gettysburg and successfully defended Little Round Top. A statue of Chamberlain (which looks less like the general and more like a cross between Senator Angus King and a popular third grade teacher here in town) stands poised just outside the gates of Bowdoin. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow are both Bowdoin alums.

So claims of who wrote what when, and where, is no small thing in these parts. Still, this argument over where Stowe penned Uncle Tom’s Cabin  -- and how it affects a property’s value -- is pure silliness.  Ask any mother who writes.

At a time when there were no washing machines, dishwashers, or personal computers, Harriet Beecher Stowe had seven children and completed more than 30 books. She wrote with ink and a steel nib; she lit with lamp oil. I had two children, babysitting help, and a MacBook, and when my children were young I could barely complete a grocery list, let alone a novel. Sleep and logical, sequential thought were both casualties of those early parenting years.

I can tell you that Stowe probably wrote wherever she could: the family’s house on Federal, her husband’s office in Appleton Hall, maybe even, occasionally, that house at 28 College (although in Stowe’s day the building was located on Park Row.)  I’ll bet she’d have locked herself in the privy out back with ink and paper if she thought it might buy her 15 minutes of alone time.

We Writer-Mothers claw, carve, eke out and wrest time and inspiration from the daily storm of errands, diapers, and meals prepared, eaten and cleared. Children comforted, entertained, bathed. Stowe wrote to her sister-in-law, “Nothing but deadly determination enables me ever to write.” God, yes. We must be determined. And deadly.  Not in the violent sense, but in terms of taking the work seriously. This pursuit is not a hobby (despite what my accountant says) or a passing phase. It’s a passion and a calling and it requires, demands, rests upon, time and space, both literal and figurative. 

 Bowdoin has recently completed a marvelous renovation of 63 Federal Street, the house where the Stowe’s lived from 1850-52. A room on the first floor of the house has been designated “Harriet’s Writing Room,” and the college has done a fine job of weaving together the history of the house, the family and the larger community.

But let’s be honest: this lovely space, which rivals the platonic ideal of a Pottery Barn catalogue home-office, is not the only room where Uncle Tom’s Cabin might have been written. I actually take issue with any attempt to pinpoint the “place.” Because as those of us who write, and who mother, know, that’s just not how it happens.

“Writing” doesn’t always involve a well-appointed office and clear desk in a room of one’s own. We make space when and where we can and these spaces are rarely neat or convenient. JK Rowling scribbled the plot for Harry Potter in a tea shop, on a napkin, with a child in a stroller. Toni Morrison composed novels while her children played at her feet. Louise Erdrich would strew toys in a line on the floor, buying precious writing minutes as her baby crawled to each one. Laurie Halse Anderson brought a laptop to her kids’ games, tapping out Speak while perched on the bleachers.

So the question for me is not where Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin … but how?

I’m confident Arline Pennell Lay’s attempt to pick Bowdoin’s deep pockets will be sorted out by lawyers who specialize in contracts. Meanwhile, I’m in awe of Harriet’s achievement. And grateful that in my history-rich town, her determination and her spirit continue to inspire. You can’t put a price on that.

21 Childrens Books

Today is the last day of Ramadan 2016 so I thought I'd wrap up #RamadanReads with this terrific list from Colours of Us, a site devoted to multicultural children's books. I've already blogged about several of the books on this list, but many others were new to me, so enjoy!

Eid-al-Fitr is tomorrow, July 6th. Best wishes to all my Muslim friends and their families as you celebrate!

What we Celebrate

Fireworks, Orr's Island, Maine

I grew up in a family where we said our bedtime prayers. I still remember my nightly "tag line" to God: Bless Mommy, Daddy, Jerry-Boy, Nana, Polly, Christine, Coco and Ellie. And Dear God, please don't let it rain on the Fourth of July.

That's right. In my child's hierarchy of Divine Entreaty, the American celebration of Independence ranked right up there with my parents, siblings, best girlfriend, dog and parrot. That's because in my small town, the Fourth of July was a magical day.

For months in advance, men in straw hats went door to door asking for contributions. These were The Holiday Observers, basically a group of town fathers, whose job it was to make sure the holidays were properly observed.

These guys didn't just collect money. They organized the Fourth of July sack races and potato-on-a-spoon races and hoop races and sweated in the melting heat of the all-day-grill at the ball field, selling burgers and dogs for improbably low prices (I remember 25-cent burgers, could that be right?) and purchased the trophies for all the end-of-year baseball and softball All-Star games which were held that day (along with all the races) and made sure the cotton candy truck showed up, as well as the guy who sold Pixie Sticks (three-foot long tubes filled with tart sugar) and the other vendor who sold those glow-in-the-dark necklaces which you later put in your freezer (who said they lasted longer that way? what a lie) until they slowly, sadly glowed out, and most importantly, above all: purchased, and ignited, the annual fireworks display at the town fields.

For some reason this was always the best day and the best night of my young life. I'm trying to figure out why. I never won any races (Joanne Stiles, the fastest girl in town, always won them all. All. Even the potato-on-a-spoon.) and my softball team usually came in second and got the consolation trophy and frankly, the 25-cent burgers were gross and greasy. But I remember my excitement on Fourth of July morning when I'd get on my bike early and peddle downtown and spend the entire long lazy day into late afternoon with ... everyone. The whole community. You'd bump into pretty much everybody you knew and graze the bad food and play the games and watch Joanne win all the races and I've never felt so free, yet so connected, at any other time in my life. As the sun set the entire town would gather at the ball field and set up blankets and lawn chairs, staking out little family islands which actually had no boundaries, everyone eventually fading into shadows illuminated by those glow-in-the-dark necklaces, until the first of the Holiday Observers pyrotechnics sputtered to life and ... the moment we had all been waiting for! The fireworks.

They were predictable as well as spectacular, which is why we loved them. There were the cannon booms and individual sparklies which burst over our heads in varying colors and circumferences. There was the "waterfall," in which a string of white lights erupted into a Niagara-like cascade of sparks. There was the Portrait of George Washington, a "tableau" if you will, of red,white and blue flame. And of course, the penultimate Grand Finale. So loud, so bright, so many fireworks shot into the sky at once. When it was over, to the smell of sulphur and the haze of drifting smoke and ash, we gathered our coolers and blankets and lawn chairs and herdlike, shuffled en masse to our cars or neighborhoods if we were walking distance ... or even if we weren't walking distance, it made more sense to walk a mile than deal with the clog of cars. In the dark, amidst the strange smells of afterburn, we resembled a retreat of sorts. A shadowy, hasty evacuation. Keeping track of the small children was important.

I loved it all, every bit of it, and prayed the weather would comply each year. Sometimes it didn't, and this was a bitter disappointment. I don't think my own children, despite growing up in a smallish town and coming from a community where fireworks and cookouts are a big part of life, had quite the experience I had. That heady combination of freedom and community. This massive party to which we were all invited and everyone belonged.

I still pray. I'm a big believer in prayer, actually, although the list has changed. And grown. Exponentially. And I've changed. And I'm worried my country has changed, too. And while I still love fireworks and clapped and laughed the other night watching the lovely display over the water near Orr's Island and I'm making potato salad and burgers on the grill for friends this afternoon, I have a nagging sense that's not enough. It's not enough to simply be happy and have fun today. Not when I read what passes for political "discourse" these days. Not when I see our country locked in a state of perpetual war. And young men who graduated from high school with my son don uniforms and talk about their future deployments.

Roy Scranton, a writer I never heard about until I read his essay in The New York Times, is a veteran who urges us to examine what we celebrate today. I think he speaks with the hard-earned authority of someone who has seen combat and put his life on the line. Take a look at his essay. These lines particularly resonated with me:

There is another version of America beyond the noise our fireworks make: not military strength, but the deliberate commitment to collective self-determination. Perhaps this Fourth of July we could commemorate that. Instead of celebrating American violence, we might celebrate our Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the ideals those documents invoke of an educated citizenry deciding its fate not through war but through civil disagreement.

John Lewis, who crossed that bridge at Selma and sat on the floor of the House of Representatives last week comes to mind. Who, or what, can you name?

Best Eid Ever

The Best Eid Ever, written by Asma Mobin-Uddin and illustrated by Laura Jacobsen, is about Aneesa, a Muslim girl who will celebrate Eid with her grandmother because her parents are away.

To cheer Aneesa, who misses her parents, grandma gifts her with several beautiful outfits, one for each of the three days of Eid. However, when Aneesa wears one of them to the mosque, she notices some refugee girls who are dressed poorly ... I guess you can imagine what happens next.

This read-aloud for young elementary school kids would be a great choice for Muslim and non-Muslim children alike, and is perfect not only for teaching simple lessons about generosity and kindness, but also for capturing the spirit of Ramadan and Eid.

Neighbors to the North

Instead of posting a #kidlit recommendation for #RamadanReads today, I'm sharing this article from today's New York Times: Refugees Encounter a Foreign Word: Welcome.

It's an inspiring but also unblinking look at the generous, heroic actions of Canadians who are sponsoring Syrian families. And it reminded me of many Mainers I've met, and learned from, over the years, who have devoted their careers, their time, and their friendship to newcomers from around the world. Several that come to mind (and I encourage you to visit these sites and check out their work!):

Julia Sleeper of Tree Street Youth in Lewiston, Maine

Molly Haley of The Telling Room in Portland, Maine

Kirsten Cappy and Anne Sibley O'Brien, creators of I'm Your Neighbor

These folks inspire me! I hope they inspire you.