"To have written one good poem—good used seriously—is an unlikely and marvelous thing that only a couple hundred writers of English, at the most, have done—it's like sitting out in the yard in the evening and having a meterorite fall in one's lap." Randall Jarrell
(Happy Halloween!)
Upon re-reading So Long, See You Tomorrow (William Maxwell) for the third time, the mystery was not what would happen—I already knew—but what I would find that would remind me of why I have always loved this book.
Why it has haunted me.
Why I think that it is perhaps the truest (I didn't say best, I didn't say most beautiful, I don't say most perfect, I said truest) novel I've ever read.
Just now, finishing, I remember.
It is the word "undestroyed" in the final sentence. How it pins the heart to the page.
P.S. A little bit of something nice today: Booklist posted its starred review of UNDERCOVER as today's Review of the Day. http://www.booklistonline.com/
The streams near here are running high (two full days of storm) and there is wind in the water, wind and rocks.
I have been thinking about the word, "enough." What we mean when we say it, and how saying it (meaning it) defines us.
Ruby Heart
(Beth Kephart)
In the white saucer of your car through the dark
we drive Tiburon to Berkeley —
the water wide to our either side,
the earth collapsible and folding.
Not the garden, not the wall of black and whites,
not your daughter in the halo chair now sleeping,
not the fortuneteller with the horns for ears,
the vectors for lashes: Not yet.
The blue house is not yet.
The street you’ll make from the highway
on this Monday is impressionable, not yet.
Still us only, driving. Still the car that elicits envy
for how it forces our abandon, gives us nothing
to hold onto but our own faith in our own right
to another day. Still the faulted land
and the bay so complete it would sink us
like the minerals we have, after all this living become.
You ruby red, the color of heart.
Me sapphire, sky beyond sky.
"I did not understand that the perfect sentence is not a happy accident but something more like a consummation, an announcement that everything—the whole work—is in place, ready."
Sven Birkerts, from an essay entitled "Humboldt's Gift"
Today I paid homage, one last time, to an oil painting that has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. It's too long to be photographed well, and the lighting was wrong, but here it is, just the same, Buildings Designed by Schulze and Weaver Architects, 1921-1936. The artist was my great uncle, Lloyd Morgan, and the primary buildings, left to right, are the Hotel Pierre, the Waldorf-Astoria, and the Sherry-Netherland; the Boca Ratan sits at the feet of the Astoria. My great uncle was the principal designer of them all.
My brother, sister, and I grew up visiting our great uncle's Tarryton, NY, home, and this was the painting that hung on the one, proud livingroom wall. It was his life work, a single cityscape risen against a red-brown sky, and after he passed away, the painting was sent to us, where it resided, first, in my father's corporate office, and, later, in our family basement. None of our walls were ever big enough to hold it.
Next week, following a massive restoration process, the painting gets shipped to the Wolfsonian—Florida International University, a museum that has long been collecting our great uncle's things and had (but we never knew it) been in search of this painting. In a retrospective issue, The American Hotel named it the Lost Painting. It isn't lost anymore.
Once, in a book called STILL LOVE IN STRANGE PLACES, I said that words are the weights that hold our histories in place.
Today, saying goodbye to this family heirloom, I thought of how paintings serve that function, too.
I give my son my favorite books to read, and I find them, months later—beneath his bed, stuck in his pile of first-draft screenplays, in among his paycheck stubs—with all the stop pages turned back like some kind of origami.
When I read the books again I find myself following his trail—the parentheses he placed around the chapters, the suspense he held back for himself. The reading mind in action.
P.S. A shout out to someone whose new book I'll soon be reading—Melissa Walker, whose VIOLET ON THE RUNWAY shares pick of the month space with my own UNDERCOVER in the current issue of Family Circle. I love the way seeeming happenstance brings people together. I'm not just reading Melissa's novel because she's an extremely generous person. I'm reading it because I am a fan, why, yes I am, of America's Next Top Model, and because I suspect Melissa has a lot of insight into that whole gorgeous-on-the-outside-but-what-about-the-inside world.
http://www.parents.com/parents/story.jsp?storyid=/templatedata/fc/story/data/1185997737466.xml
This is Montreal, two summers ago, above the salsa pier. This is a girl on the edge, looking down.
Risk it, I want to tell her. Dance. Don't wait to break past yourself.
Within the space of a year, I will have been lucky enough (and yes, a whole lot of luck has been involved) to have published three books—all risks. FLOW, the autobiography of the Schuylkill River, made a whole lot of people wonder out loud: A river's autobiography? Would that be fiction or nonfiction? Would that be a poem? Is there an audience for such a concoction? UNDERCOVER, the novel for young adults, took me to places I hadn't gone as a writer. ZENOBIA, a book I co-authored and due out next January, is a corporate fable, an Alice in Wonderlandesque journey through a sclerotic, crooked, teetering organization—not the usual business book fare, and certainly not the memoir genre with which I began published life.
The point is: I'm out on the edge of a cliff, and I'm happier than I've ever been as a writer. Because of FLOW I've met some of the most daring and compelling people I've ever met (people who care about a city, people who are healing a city). Because of UNDERCOVER I've stumbled into a world of big-hearted readers. And ZENOBIA isn't out yet, but already it is teaching me new things about what people want, what they end up doing.
Break back, I say, and dance.
Ever since I published UNDERCOVER, whose language-craving heroine is encouraged by her English teacher to keep a journal full of words, I've been hearing stories about others' books of words, bulletin boards of words, scraps-of-loose-paper-in-file-folders collections of words. Even my son came home one day not long ago saying, In English they're asking us for our own book of words. He groaned (he didn't love studying the SAT vocab lists either). But in the end he came up with something so cool and defining that I had to sneak away and look up some of his words myself.
You could ask what for and why keep a book of words, since there's always a dictionary nearby, since any word you could conceivably want is already in some book somewhere. Since you can't really own a word, can't say, This word is mine.
Me? I keep a book of words because my brain is rather small, because it doesn't remember what I want it to remember, needs jogging, much of the time. You, for example, might carry the meanings of "despumate" and "thigmotropic" around in your head. I have to go back, look them up, remember why I liked them to begin with, think about how I might use them somewhere. (I just did.) You might be reading along and know "vatic," no problem. I had to look it up and after I did, I rather liked it, and now it's in my book of words so that someday (maybe) I'll return to it and wrap it up inside some poem.
A child asks: What is the surest way to success as a writer? Success being (the child says) fame, being fortune. Because it happened to J.K. Rowling. Because it should happen to us all.
I want to say: Change the terms of your equation. Seek, first, conversation with yourself. Then conversation with others. Then impact.
Barcelona was hot three summers ago, when I was there, but the mimes were out in force. It was morning when I found this one. He hadn't yet finished his face.
A few days ago, when I was thinking about beginning a new project—crafting a new voice, shaping a new promise—I returned to this image. How perfectly it captured my state of my mind. The grimace. The incompleteness. The checking of self against self in the mirror.
It doesn't matter how many books you have written, how many poems. The first words are the first words. An experiment. A tremble.
This past Monday I went to Baltimore to spend some time with booksellers, librarians, and other writers. Mostly I went to answer one question: Is UNDERCOVER teachable, and if so, what sort of writing workshops and conversations might it spark?
The funny thing is that I didn't write the book with "teachable" in mind; I really was just following a story, building characters, looking toward and past conflict. But inevitably (probably) there are a whole lot of lessonesque moments in this book, scenes in which Elisa, the heroine, begins to build her own book of words, or to learn villanelles, or to think about what metaphors mean. I happen to be one of the biggest proponents of the imagination out there (my fourth book, SEEING PAST Z: NURTURING THE IMAGINATION IN A FAST-FORWARD WORLD, W.W. Norton, was dedicated to the theme) and I guess I just couldn't help layering into UNDERCOVER some of what I've tried to teach young writers myself.
If any of you reading any of this would like a flyer on the topic, let me know. I can send the PDF to your email address.
Newsflash:
Arts in Schools Collaborative/Dancing Classrooms Philly (Jane Brooks and Joyce W. Burd Co-Executive Directors), that extra-fabulous program that teaches civility and grace to young people by way of the meringue, tango, swing, and fox trot, is coming right here, to my very own Philadelphia, culminating in a city-wide competition, held December 15th.
I sort of jumped up and down when I heard it. Then I got a hold of myself. Then I was just jumping up and down inside, where no one could see, because nothing goes together better than grace and music and kids.
Stay tuned for details.
PS My own HOUSE OF DANCE isn't coming out until next June (though there are now galleys).
The mind falls in on itself sometimes, and the day delivers no stories.
Later there is a slate sky and a full-out storm, and afterwards steady streams of rain while the sun returns and (is it blasphemy?) shines.
The rain coming down while the sun came down beside it, and still I was searching for words.
Photograph
(Beth Kephart)
That was me before I knew myself
to be green-eyed and dissatisfied
with every sentence
I would not write. In my mother’s arms
with my father’s gaze upon me
and my brother in an ear-flap hat,
standing his ground. That was the house
with the sandbox backyard
and the streamered tricycles
and the piano my father sometimes played,
still smelling of heat and blaze, refinery
fires. The sky before us is behind us
and it is the way my mother holds me
that hurts me most, the way my father
already sees himself in his first daughter
and anticipates her unseasonable need
to smack her palm against the sun,
to run, self-glorified, to the sea
and mourn for dolphins there. Last night
it was much too cold to sit outside
and I sat, and the stars seemed upside down
and scolding, and a storm, it had been reported,
was on its way, but this was before that,
and it was cold, and I was wretched again
with the beauty I have joined and failed to keep.
So I found this and I loved this, and I had to share it:
"Give over to the heavy lifting of the real freight of your soul. Take your pictures. Just for yourself, take them. That's how everything turns to silence, how history passes through your heart, how the world reverts to poetry."
Patricia Hampl, The Florist's Daughter
Next time you're feeling wordemptyimagehollow, hop a train. You are going to hear someone sing (real low). You are going to watch someone struggle. You are going to look out the window and see some kiddy pool caught up in the limb spokes of a tree.
Someone will tell you a story.
Yesterday, for example, I was coming home from Baltimore when I got lucky. Sat beside Stacey Patton, an historian and writer whose new book is THAT MEAN OLD YESTERDAY. Not an easy book, but a fierce, smart one, and not Stacey's last book either, that's for certain. We got to talking. She pulled, from her bag, a box of postcards. Not happy, wish you were here postcards, but disturbing bits of the historic record that she's been buying off collectors for a while, images of African American children as drawn by ugly-minded men. Stacey's writing about this, mulling this, telling me about this on the train, and despite the harsh hurt of her subject matter, her passion for it all is glorious, and I just sat, and I just listened, thinking: An hour ago, I knew nothing of this.
I've sat beside poets on trains, who started dancing right in the middle of some grand poeticizing. I've sat behind diva girls. I've sat in front of couples who started out fighting and ended up (end of the line) back in love again. Something always happens on a train, and there's always rhythm wending up and through it.
Writing is not a competitive sport, nor, as my son likes to say, post-timed SAT essay test, should it be undertaken to the tick of a stopwatch. You play a sport, you are playing by rules. You write, and what is often most glorious is the rules you break, the tenses you re-make, the guideposts you ignore to pull your readers close. You play a sport and you're hunting trophies. Writers hunting for trophies, by and large, are disappointed, which leads to disillusion, which spells either silence or sourness, which is the paired malaise writers must fight hard to avoid, if not for themselves, than at least for the sake of those who love them.
I go for elisions in writing. For bridges and breakaways, slides and stutters, repetitions. I write books that break form, dodge categorization, mess with genre, and if I had to think of myself as going head-to-head against some other writer, as match-worthy, race-wise, suited up, I don't think I'd get far. I think I'd shut down, fall back on what has already been done.
What is already known.
Can you teach writing? It's the age-old question. I think the better question is: How can we clear more space in which writers might work? How can we help them honor their own imaginations?
P.S. A thank you to the ever-gracious Maureen at my local Barnes & Noble for holding the event that enabled some of us to talk about some of this, yesterday.
Her Spanish, Her Spanish
(Beth Kephart)
I’d held her hand. I’d taken her
up the sun-bleached streets of Anapra,
dust in her lashes like sleep,
her Spanish small so that I leaned
as we walked, closed her hand
more nearly into mine,
as if love were a vigilance.
Dogs in the street,
the scythe of a horse’s teeth,
the wild springs of a deserted mattress
partitioning the bone yards
of squatters, and a doll
sacrificed to tumbleweed.
Her hand in my hand
was the word,
her Spanish, my song.
Later two half-moons of blisters will rise up
from the scuffed plains of her feet —
the white heat of cooking grease
from her mother’s kitchen.
Her suffering the border between us.
her Spanish, her Spanish
and a dog turning in the street,
the clatter of ice.
Here in Pennsylvania, autumn took a long time coming, but the winds blew hard from a cracked, blue place today, and the sun came more coyly through my window—pushed through ruby-tipped leaves before it forced its way into my room.
Smashed itself onto my desk.
Rearranged shadows.
Super-charged weather, as my writer friend Alyson Hagy has taught me, takes you halfway down the road toward plot, toward the new. So today I decided not to do much at all, just to open myself to the wind.
A note from writer/teacher Lia Purpura blew in. I took a long time reading, considering. Lia was thinking out loud about the importance of something she calls "lostness," about the value of not knowing. Writerly technique can be taught, it can be pressed upon a writer, she said (and she should know, since she's taught at the Iowa Writer's Workshop). But knowing simply can't be taught. Knowing takes time, and how can any writing matter, really, if it doesn't have wisdom at its core? Lia is one of those people who doesn't judge if she doesn't have to. She's got an essay coming out in Seneca in November, called, " What is a Lyric Essay: Provisional Responses." Take a look. It will surprise you.
After reading Lia's note and essay, I picked up Mary Oliver's OUR WORLD again. The book fell open to an Oliver essay about the importance of paying attention. "I was eager to address the world of words—to address the world with words," Oliver writes. "Then M. instilled in me this deeper level of looking and working, of seeing through the heavenly visibles to the heavenly invisibles."
I took the picture of the little girl in this blog earlier this summer, in the main plaza of San Miguel de Allende. I had this sense, when I first found her sitting there, that if I took her picture, and took that picture home, I'd know something of her story. See through to an invisible. Find a story.
Is she watchful or bored? Is she timid or bold? Is yellow a borrowed color, or her own?
But it's been a few months, and I still don't have any answers—no trail to walk down, no open portal. I am still thinking about what this girl might mean. About who she might become in a story. It's a form of lostness. It's an essential part of process.
So I've been writing, in this blog, all about books and words and photos and sounds, but let me take a morning's moment to celebrate the thing that transcends all that, which is (of course) young souls. I have had the most terrific time as a mom (and yes, my son, who thoroughly blows me away with his own edgy, classy, dialogue-fabulous, plot-enhanced writing, is nearly college bound), and I've had the greatest time kicking back and reading and writing with kids in classrooms, gardens, my own tiny but sun-filled house.
But this beautiful creature here in this photograph happens to be my youngest niece, who taught me a little about reading nine months or so ago. We were all gathered at my parents' house and she'd brought a library book with her, and nothing made her happier—nothing—than to be able to read that book out loud. The predictable patterning of the rhymes helped her out. The pictures kept her on track. The fact that her own mom had read it to her until it had the free-falling flow of the familiar. It was like watching a dance, watching this little one read, and it was also like seeing the future. Because she was opening doors for herself and she was so entrancingly eager for more. Watching her blonde head bob, watching her sky eyes shine, I sat there thinking that we who deign to write have responsibilities—to make it fun, to make it smart, to keep readers wanting more.
A White Flower Blooms in a Red Garden
(Beth Kephart)
When I die:
The bloomed-out pink of a peony nearest my head,
a deer at the edge of the gazebo,
a soprano bird in the near limb
of the river birch,
the river birch peeling.
It will be a day like today begun
with dahlias in the garden,
lisianthus in full crown,
something once said in my head,
sky settled on the tongue
of the bearded iris,
and what you call metaphor
will be just my way of saying God
while the breeze carries by on the smooth stone back
of a common turtle
in the final syllable
of the final hour.
This morning,
in a clump of flowers that has always ripened red,
a white stray with only a zest of that blood color
at its prayerful center.
The end of something.
The near beginning.
If you've ever read Mary Oliver's poetry, you'll know why I felt compelled to weave it into UNDERCOVER. Elisa, my novel's heroine, is struggling to define herself, to use her gift for language to emerge as her own important person. Dr. Charmin, Elisa's English teacher, wants to help. She's asked Elisa to create a book of words. She's encouraged her to believe in her own work. And then, toward the end of UNDERCOVER, Dr. Charmin gives Elisa a copy of Mary Oliver's poem, "Wild Geese," which begins, "You do not have to be good" and leads toward a line that starts, "Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,/the world offers itself to your imagination...."
"Wild Geese" is extraordinary—heartrending and uplifting at the same time. It's the poem that Elisa needs to push through to herself, the gift that Dr. Charmin shares.
Many volumes of Mary Oliver's work sit across from me as I type, alongside the work of other favorite poets (Stanley Kunitz, Ted Kooser, Rainer Maria Rilke, James Wright, Louise Gluck, Jack Gilbert, Gregory Djanikian, Gerald Stern, C.K. Williams). Recently I learned of another extraordinary Mary Oliver book, this one called OUR WORLD and featuring the photography of Oliver's long-time partner, Molly Malone Cook. It's a composite book—part journal, part poetry, part reminsce, and loss, always, and love, always. It is a book so full of clarity that you feel the breeze blowing through.
As I was writing about the gift of friendship earlier this morning, I was also thinking about the gift of time. I run a business most days each week — consulting to companies, creating (with my husband-partner) corporate annual reports and history books, brochures, branding strategies, brochures. It's great work to have, and we're grateful. (http://www.fusion-communications.com/)
But always the stories are stirring within. Always I'm stealing time, four in the morning, usually. Ten at night. Train trips and plane trips, vacations. I write because I'm happiest writing. Because that's what calm is for me.
A couple of years ago, I had the idea to write a book about the Schuylkill River that runs through my city, Philadelphia. I thought about the river as a she, as a woman who could never die and was forced to flow over her own history, daily. I thought about all the Philadelphians who had crossed over her, sat beside her, fished from her, waded through her, rowed down her. I thought about how it would feel to reflect a comet, or to be skated on, or to search endlessly for someone or something to love.
I wanted to write the river's autobiography, in other words—a strange enough idea, by some standards. I knew I'd need a lot of time in bookstacks, in archives, talking to people. Time I'd have difficulty stealing.
So I wrote about what I hoped to do, wrote a preface, wrote about me, and sent all that in with a Pew Fellowships in the Arts grant application. Extreme good luck was on my side, and in 2005, I was one of several artists who won. Time had been granted. A book could be made.
There are an amazing number of open doors out there. Resources that validate, fund, and provide. Lifelines. Check out the following sites, for example, and start building your bridges.
http://www.proofpositive.com/contests/writecontests.htm
http://www.winningwriters.com/resources/ur_web_detail.php?subcategory_code=STUD
http://www.teenink.org/Resources/ContestsR.html
Here's a confession: Beyond my fabulous high school English teacher, I didn't have someone looking over my writing shoulder until I had already given birth to a son. I took History and Sociology of Science courses at the University of Pennsylvania (enduring calculus, biology, and chemistry along the way). I graduated and filled journal after journal with poems. I married a guy who draws spectacularly well but doesn't have, shall we say, a passion for reading. One day I picked up and read a book that advertised itself as memoir — ROAD SONG, by Natalie Kutz — and decided, right then, to try my own hand at the form. Kutz had published her first essay in a magazine called "Iowa Woman." I (and this still registers as a miracle to me) published my first essay there. I wrote Kutz a letter telling her how much I loved her work. She wrote a letter back (an even grander miracle) complimenting the letter that I'd written her, telling me something of her ambitions with story. I framed that letter. It sits here still.
But it wasn't until my son was four years old that our family of three headed for Spoleto, Italy, so that I could take a writing workshop with Rosellen Brown and Reginald Gibbons. The entire thing was revelatory—the exercises we were given, the critiques that were levied, the way we'd head off for a cemetery, say, and then be asked to fashion an entire life out of the birth and death dates on tombstones. We fiddled with past and present tense inside a cool, white room. We traded favorite books beneath a faded canopy at lunch. We talked about how each other's stories might be shaped on the trains we took to Florence or Assisi.
The point is — well, there are a lot of points, but one of the points is this: I learned the value of camraderie in writing. I began to reach out. Took another writing workshop another summer or so later—this one with Jayne Anne Phillips and William Gass in Prague. Continued to write to authors whose work I loved, and to hear, more often than not, back (I have, in my possession, a most-prized postcard from Michael Ondaatje). Would find myself sitting on panels or judging contests or contributing stories to anthologies with people I respected, people who became lasting friends.
There are a lot of great things that can happen in a writing life. There are achievements that we're all running after. But for me, the very best thing has been this forging of friendships with those whose work I respect, whose opinions I weigh, whose lives I care about. Writing has set me down inside a world of conversations about process, archetypes, disappointments, breakthroughs that I find, frankly, thrilling. It has given me something that I might as well call "belonging"—word by word, and story by story.
As you've probably figured out by now, I'm keen on photographs. I make them. I study them. I rely on them. Always. I go out taking pictures the way some people go out shopping, and when I'm stuck for light or life in a sentence, I start sifting through my images. Hunting for details. Hunting for mood.
But you have to be careful when working with photographs. You have to know what they mean. They're not definitive, that's for sure. There is always a before and always an after to every picture taken, always something elusive and lovely just outside the frame.
I'm interested in the suggested, the evoked, when I work on my stories, poems, and memoirs. I'm interested in the words in column 2 below, try to work past or through that which sits in column 1. I'm not writing legal briefs or journalism, and so I have that freedom. I have that right, that opportunity, and so I seize it.
Column 1 Column 2
Explain/ Illuminate
Record/ Remember
Argue/ Explore
Retaliate/ Evolve
Condemn/ Liberate
Accuse/ Understand
Obliterate/ Rescue
Attach/ Approach
Demand/ Long for
This past weekend, I joined authors, publishers, librarians, and booksellers in Oakland, CA, for the annual Northern California Independent Booksellers Association convention. It can be just a tad overwhelming, seeing so many books in one place. But it is also a truly very cool thing that so many people still care so passionately about the stories that get told.
Over dinner, Saturday night, I was entertained, regaled, diverted, delighted (there's got to be a better word) by Jennifer Laughran and Shannon Mathis of Books Inc., who told mind-blowing stories about the events they've put on to honor authors (picture 500 people going elbow-to-elbow to hear a favorite writer within the walls of an urban bookstore, and you get the idea). I listened to Dennis and Linda Ronberg of Linden Tree talk about what makes for classic children's tales (something about the wash of sound, the float of language, the intrigue of imagery). Richie Partington, the reviewer and librarian, named his favorite books of the year and said just why (visit his web site (http://richiespicks.com/) so that he can tell you himself), while Storyteller's Ruth and Melissa Manlove made it clear that books get sold one by one—that books have to fit their readers. Finally there was the story that Hicklebee's Ann Seaton told about how long favorite childhood books live on.
I wouldn't have been privy to any of this, had it not been for Kristin Bowers of HarperCollins, who had read UNDERCOVER and been enthusiastic about it, and who had brought all these fabulous people together for the sake of friendship and books. Which left me thinking, as I lay watching the moon through a hotel window that night, that there is still so much that is honorable about books. Forget the publicity machines and the Amazon ratings. Forget the chase for reviews. In the end it's the way books bring us together that counts. It's the laughter over martinis and spice.
Since this is the season of Dancing with the Stars (I'm rooting for Helio Castroneves), I wanted to post briefly about my second HarperTeen young adult novel that is titled HOUSE OF DANCE. HOUSE is the story of a girl named Rosie who, during the summer of her 15th year, is asked to take care of her dying grandfather. During her daily trips across town Rosie discovers a second-floor dance studio, and with the help of its dancers, discovers a way to give her grandfather one final gift. HOUSE will appear in June 2008.
Writing HOUSE gave me the chance to explore some important themes—the place of memory in our lives, the power of forgiveness, the mysteries of kindness. It also gave me a chance to write about the rumba, the cha-cha, the waltz, the fox trot—these dances that I've been learning at a fabulous nearby studio since April 2006 (then practicing at home, when no one is looking). It is so incredibly hard to get every aspect of a dance just right. To master (except that I'll never master) the tension, the snap, the precision. Learning to dance has forced me to pay attention to new kinds of details. It is giving me perspective on the rise and fall of words.
Oh, and I have new friends, too. And I love them.
Though, Elisa, the heroine of UNDERCOVER is an aspiring writer, she still has a whole lot to figure out. There's an entire universe of words that she still hasn't explored, or made her own. There are voices that she's been hiding behind. And then there are all the ways that poems can get crafted—forms she's still struggling to master.
One day Dr. Charmin, Elisa's English teacher, asks the class to create a villanelle, which is in fact a French construction—a type of poem that takes its power from the repetition of refains. The first line of the first tercet (a three-line stanza) becomes the last line in the second and fourth tercets, while the third line in the first tercet appears as the final lines of tercets three and five. And then there's a crescendo of four lines—a quatrain—in which the two refrains appear one last time, to close the poem. Villanelles take their readers on circuitous journeys--in and out of a mood, around an idea, toward something true but elusive. You could chant an infant to sleep with a villanelle. You could ride the endless crest of a heartbreak.
I find the villanelle to be a terrific challenge. I've loved gathering young writers together and hearing them read famous villanelles out loud—Theodore Roethke's "The Waking," for example, or "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas (these and other villanelles can be found in the wonderful Norton anthology THE MAKING OF A POEM). I love watching them ease into the rhythms as they pass bits of the poem off to one another. But what is even more exciting is watching young writers fashion villanelles themselves. With the sound of masterful villanelles in their ear, with the patterns and the beat pressed upon them, they seem to transition effortlessly into the making of their own poems, the discovery of their own essential repetitions.
Villanelles require the opening of one's thoughts to song. They require a poet's faith that meaning itself can be found within sound.
How daunting do you find the blank page? How intimidating—this inescapable fact that stories have been written and told and retold and critiqued and embossed and fictionalized and exposed as autobiography (and vice versa) since the beginning of time? Is there anything left to write? Any impact we can have, as writers writing today?
I used to wonder about this all time. Then I stumbled over a few stunning little facts in Richard Lederer's book, THE MIRACLE OF LANGUAGE. He makes the claim that, with the exception of everyday phrases like "How are you?" and "I am fine," most of the sentences we speak are not borrowed, but our own. We may think we are seeing the same thing as someone else, we may be absolutely sure that we are thinking about it in the same way, but in the end, we find our own way to tell the story.
Choose a photograph. Gather a group of friends. Give yourselves just 20 words—no more, no less—to tell the story of the photograph. Take five minutes, and compare your work. Chances are that each of you have now composed the beginning of utterly different stories.
In the spring of 2001, I was asked to chair the National Book Awards' Young People's Literature Jury, and I took that task on with trepidation. I worked with four others who knew the genre well—Kay Cassell, Ellen Howard, Lisa Clayton Robinson, and Jane Resh Thomas—and among the many questions we asked each other and ourselves were: What is genuine? What has real meaning? What must ultimately endure?
We were sent some 160 new books—biographies, picture books, novels, poetry, plays, science, fantasy, history, memoir, even one quasi cookbook. I watched them pile up in the corner of my already-wheezing office. As a team we were determined to honor the five best titles we were given to consider. We concerned ourselves with matters of framing, form, and voice; with credibility and characterization, with the execution of plot or storyline. We studied the language—was it rigorous? Tantalizing? Fresh? We explored dynamics pertaining to originality and mood, meaning and soul. We thought out loud about each book’s innate capacity to alert, embolden, and inspire. Enduring books are, I think, the ones that enter the blood streams of their readers; that stir and shape and finally transform. They are the ones that get passed on, parent to child, friend to friend, the ones that jolt us toward insight, compassion, idea, hope, politics, or love. Toward the answers to the questions we must keep asking.
The five books we finally nominated for the 2001 Young People’s Literature Award answered to every conceivable literary standard, and I still heartily recommend them to you today. There was An Na’s masterful A Step from Heaven, a book that remove the veil from the immigrant experience. There was Marilyn Nelson’s Carver: A Life in Poems—brilliant, elegant, intelligent. There was Kate DiCamillo’s The Tiger Rising, which is haunting and gorgeous. There was Phillip Hoose’s tour-de-force We Were There. And then there was the winner, Virginia Euwer’s Wolff’s True Believer, which we found audacious and fabulous, an entire novel presented as a poem.
I encourage you to seek out these books, for they don't just tell us stories. They tell us how the very best books get made, which is a lesson that I'm forever learning.
For eight consecutive summers, not so long ago, I had the privilege of hanging out with young writers. Sometimes they came to my house. Sometimes we met in a garden. Sometimes we sat on someone else's porch. We'd read some of my favorite writers out loud, or imagine a room built of shadows, or work together to create a neighborhood of unforgettable characters. We'd write villanelles and pastorals and advertising lines. We'd imagine ourselves to be kites caught in trees. We'd listen to music and write to its mood.
Wherever the writers were, there was light. There was laughter. There was something that I held onto for a very long time.
When I was creating the heroine of my first novel, UNDERCOVER, I was thinking a lot about the young writers I'd met and what they'd taught me. I was thinking, too, about who I had been as a child—how much I'd loved words, and how much I also loved to ice skate. For me, language and movement will always be bound. I think of writing as an act of choreography, just as I think of ice skating as a form of storytelling.
UNDERCOVER has elements of my own life in it, therefore. But it is also inspired by the young writers working today.
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