Anne of Green Gables: Reprise

Smart was always cool for Anne of GG. She liked big words and rapturous monologues. She dared to dream out loud. And now that she's turning 100 years old, she's precipitating all kinds of celebrations—and talk. She even scored herself a spread in this week's Newsweek, and there's a line or two inside that story that has a lot of bloggers blogging. That quote, for example, from AGG scholar Trinna Frever about the "literary smart girl" serving primarily as "sidekick" in today's YA books for girls. That sentence (also Frever) about a culture that treats "intelligence as a stigmatized quality." That pull-quote that blasts the headline right out there: "That Anne has survived so long is a miracle considering the state of young-adult literature."

I sat on my deck last night reading Ramin Setoodeh's story and pondering again the teen girls I have known—their blazing, undaunted, unembarrassed intelligence. I was thinking, too, about K., that young man who is writing poems that break my heart (and letting me read them, now and again), and how I can't ever help but be inspired by these young souls. Every novel I have written and am writing for teens has a smart, language-loving center, a heroine who studies the world and weighs her words and can't stop herself from thinking. Every novel imagines as its reader the young people I have known.

Charlotte, thank you so very, very much for your exquisite, touching post.

http://charlotteslibrary.blogspot.com/

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Quiet?

I have been puzzling over the word "quiet" of late, as in, "the book is quiet," or, more truthfully, "but the book is quiet." That but. That but is what I've been puzzling over. For when I consider some extraordinary YA books—ANNE OF GREEN GABLES, for example, THE SECRET GARDEN—I think of books so impeccably quiet that one can hear a river running, one can hear one's own breath in a shady knoll. A sort of magical, human, alive quiet that never feels but-ish to me, just distilled, searching, pulsed.

Can quiet matter, still, on a page?

Can quiet be heard?

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Anne with an E, and Dance

It took me all these years to read ANNE OF GREEN GABLES, and now I am wondering how I ever lived without. I feel her on my shoulder, wherever I venture to now. I hear her insisting on the imagination, think of her faced with a newly bloomed peony, run off to the street, as I'm sure Anne would have done, whenever the Clydesdales are brought down my way at dawn, set free from their tents at the transitory horse show. Anne with an E seized upon the possible. She insisted on living each day as a last. She went about her world enthralled—looking for, hoping for goodness.

Saturday Anne was with me, too—with me and a few hundred others as Dancing Classrooms Philly conducted its Spring 08 finals competition at Drexel University. The foxtrot, the merengue, the rumba, the tango, the swing had transformed these young dancers from West and North Philadelphia. The glitter on their skirts and ties, the sunset peach above the young girls' eyes, the flowers perched, the shirt tails in, the reverberatory cries of the crowd as Pierre Dulaine urged the spectators on. The teaching artists, too: They had transformed these kids—they had changed the way they walked and stood, the way they honored one another, the way they dreamed. It was hot, and it was crowded, and the whole place throbbed, and as I took photograph after photograph of angled arms and intertwined hands, I felt Anne near—the irrepressible pulse of her.

Dance is a gift given. It is the self, rising.

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Reading

I've hit that wall; we writers do. It's time to return to the work of others, to be reminded (which for me is akin to being taught all over again) how pacing works, how suspense is hung, how knowing gets subsumed by feeling. Here on my desk, five books: The Remains of the Day, The Unaccustomed Earth, Anne of Green Gables, King Baby, and Sweeping Beauty. Reading them sometimes side by side. Hunting for epiphany. Hanging on hope.

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