She's not a sellout, is all: Martine Leavitt and Calvin

It was Tim Wynne-Jones who suggested. At Bank Street. While we were waiting for our panel on narrative risk.

Martine Leavitt is one of our smartest writers, period.

Martine Leavitt is a writer of great integrity.

Martine Leavitt spends her time making books (and teaching the artistry of making books, in the Vermont College of Fine Arts program, alongside Tim), as opposed to self-promoting.

Read Martine.

(Tim said. Rita Williams-Garcia nodded.)

And so I did. Picked up her newest, Calvin. Sat down. Utter immersion ensued.

Calvin, a seventeen-year-old smart kid who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, was born the day the very final Calvin and Hobbes comic strip was published. As a baby, he had a stuffed tiger at his side. As a young man with a best friend named Susie, he has a lot of questions. He has hope, too—delusional hope?—that Bill Watterson, the comics' creator, will create one final cartoon strip that will set Calvin free of his persistent unrealities.

Are they unrealities?

All of which (but naturally, right?) sets Calvin off across the frozen tundra of Lake Erie in pursuit of Mr. Watterson. But oh, Lake Erie is very cold and very wide. And Susie may or may not be accompanying Calvin on this trek.

It feels like just a touch of sin to reduce this elegant novel to a summary. Because yes, this is a moving and original premise. But it's what happens inside Calvin's mind that matters most. The kid asks huge questions. He ponders without restraint. He thinks about God, vastness, the otherness of others, the beauty of beauty, the difference between reality and truth, the nature of friendship. He thinks about these things profoundly—but he, and the Susie with whom he hopes he's actually traveling, always sound like kids.

Here, for example, is Calvin pondering the great silence of the lake.

When you've lived all your life with the sound of Life in General, you don't even hear it anymore. You don't hear the noise of cars, trucks, trains, airplanes, refrigerators, air conditioners, furnaces, and you don't feel radio and television waves shooting through you, and you don't hear telephones, animals, birds, floors creaking, doors opening, the voices of six billion people all talking and laughing and crying, and over a billion cows mooing and nineteen billion chickens clucking and a million species of bugs buzzing and you don't realize that it all adds up to this low hum of Life in General.

Life in General doesn't live in the middle of the lake.

There's a touch of autobiography in almost everything we read. Or we, as readers, can pretend (to ourselves) that we've pierced the veil. So that when I came upon this next passage, I thought about Tim talking about Martine—a writer far more invested in making than self-glorifying. Susie and Calvin, stranded out in the bitter cold, are wondering why Mr. Watterson has remained elusive. About why he stopped drawing Calvin and Hobbes, about why he's not talking to the press (or to these two kids).

He's just not a sellout, is all. He thinks selling out is buying into someone else's values. Or maybe he knows there's power in creating something and then stepping out of the way. All that silence, that refusal to show up for adulation—it forces you to look harder at the creation itself, like he's saying, this is what I have to say. You laugh, you cry, you think, you change—and that's the point.

It's the end of the year. I've not read half the books I should have read. I'm trying now to make amends in between corporate deadlines. But this Martine—I'd like to do some promoting for her. She's a writer we all should read. We could learn a lot from the humanity and originality of her prose. We could learn how to be artists, too.

And as for you, Mr. Tim: I'm going to try to slip a zeugma into some annual report writing today.

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Tim Wynne-Jones rocks (and he had kind things to say about This Is the Story)

You know how I adored the Bank Street conference. You know how much I think of Tim Wynne-Jones's new book, The Emperor of Any Place (and Tim himself). And you know what a rock star Tim is, Tim who is practically the King of Canada, he's so good, who has won more awards for his wide-ranging books than I have the brain cells to count.

And look, just now, here is Shelf Awareness, reaffirming what we all already knew.

So you can imagine how very happy I am that Tim took the time, not long ago, to read This Is the Story of You. He taught me something new about the book. He shared these words. They will grace the book, alongside Dana Reinhardt's gorgeous kindness when it comes out next spring from Chronicle Books.

It is the book that finally answers that age-old question what if you were a castaway thrown up on the shores of your own life. Isn't it amazing what a storm blows in: memories and mysteries. So much lost and then something found amidst the shattered flotsam -- something you couldn't have even known you were missing. A beautiful story. — Tim Wynne-Jones, Officer of the Order of Canada and award-winning author of The Emperor of Any Place, among many other titles 

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NYC in 36 hours

Some day I'll be too old for this. This insistence (within myself/for myself) that I live each minute, see each place, feel each thing I can find my way to.

But I'm not there yet. I'm still the woman who arrives mid-afternoon to New York City, checks into a hotel with her husband, and starts to walk. This time to the Columbia University campus, which I had never seen (that old library, now the administration building, soars). To the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. Past the fruit vendors on upper Broadway.

Then a subway ride to Columbus Circle and the Museum of Arts and Design (where an exquisite Wendell Castle show is in place). Then a walk-run (to the extent possible) through Times Square, and then more underground tunnels to the World Trade Center, where we were stopped by the power of those two pools, the remembered names, the roses and calla lilies left in respect and honor. Art can speak, and this art does—the down and the down of the water, the sound of that water, the return of the water, and the light behind the names.

It was the hour of the gloaming. The stone buildings burned red-orange inside the blue glass of the new tower, and that big Calatrava bird, soon to be the World Trade Center Transportation Center, was already soaring.

We walked a long length of Greenwich, then, met our son for dinner, watched him take off in an Uber for a date, made our way all the way back to 103rd Street, where all night long we listened to the trash trucks, the buses, the NYC talk just outside our window. I rose in the dark, put on a dress, and as soon as the sun was up I was walking again—finding a French bakery, buying an almond croissant, and working my way toward Central Park, where the early dog walkers were out and about and I could see the river just beyond them.

By 8:15 I was dancing with the extraordinary educator/advocator Susannah Richards in the lobby of Bank Street. Dancing, yes. I swear we danced. (Susannah is especially good at the twirls.) At Bank Street, a remarkable cast of writers, illustrators, educators, librarians, and book people were convening for what, in my book, is the best gathering of storytellers ever anywhere. Here the conversation circles around Thoughts as opposed to Marketing Platforms. The forum encourages conversation, consideration, a maybe this or a maybe that. This is hardly accidental. This reflects the good work of those who assemble this program, moderate the panels, conduct the keynote (thank you, Rita Williams-Garcia), and say yes. I bow down to you, oh Bank Street, with thanks especially to Jennifer Brown and Cynthia Weill, and then to my fellow panelists Daniel Jose Older and Tim Wynne-Jones—the three us led toward greater understanding about narrative risk by the exceptionally thoughtful questions of Vicki Smith of Kirkus Reviews. And with thanks to Chronicle Books, who said yes to the event.

When it was done, when I hugged my old and new friends goodbye, I was running again, to the subway, to the PATH, and toward my husband and son, where we walked some more, had an early dinner, and watched the lights of the World Trade Center blink on.

(Can I just thank here the little boy on the incredibly crowded train who must have read the panic of this claustrophobe on his face and said, "Miss? Do you want my seat?")

We drove home in the dark. I slept. I actually slept. The sleep of a satisfied woman.

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pushing narrative boundaries at the BankStreet Fest, with Tim Wynne-Jones and Daniel Jose Older

A few months ago I received an invitation from one of my very favorite people in all of young people's literature, Jennifer Brown. If our friendship has evolved over time, my respect for Jenny was immediate. As a Shelf Awareness reviewer, prize adjudicator, discussion leader, Bank Street visionary, and all-around children's books advocate, Jenny's opinions have mattered. She has welded intelligence with kindness and become a force. Today she serves as vice president and publisher of Knopf Books for Young Readers at Random House Children's Books—a position that is such a perfect fit for her myriad talents (and soul) that one imagines it was waiting for her all along.

Before Jenny took on that new role, she designed the 2015 BookFest@Bank Street and extended the invitation I noted above. Featuring Rita Williams-Garcia in a keynote, the day will include insights from scholars and writers Leonard S. Marcus, Adam Gidwitz, Elizabeth Bluemle, Cynthia Weill, Christopher Myers, Shadra Strickland, Raul Colon, Sara Varon, Joe Rogers, Jr., Laura Amy Schlitz, Jeanne Birdsall, Kat Yeh, Liz Kessler, and Monica Edinger. BookFest will also feature a panel titled "Pushing Narrative Boundaries in Teen Literature," moderated by the reliably smart and provocative Vicky Smith, the reviews editor of Kirkus.

I'm thrilled to be joining Tim Wynne-Jones and Daniel Jose Older on that boundaries-pushing panel. I was thrilled even before I'd read their new novels, The Emperor of Any Place and Shadowshaper, respectively. But now, having spent the last few days immersed in both, I'm even more eager. This will be a conversation. The kind of conversation that I crave like I crave a perfect peach or a ripe Bartlett pear.

The Emperor of Any Place is a work of supreme art. A nested story within a story (and, one might suggest, within another story) that carries the reader in and out of history. There's the present-day reality of a teen named Evan who has lost his father and must now endure (within the knot of his grief) the arrival of his once-estranged grandfather. There is, as well, the story inside the book Evan's father was reading when he died—the diary of a Japanese soldier stranded on a small Pacific island during World War II. The soldier is not the sole inhabitant of that island, nor is he the only one who ultimately writes inside those diary pages. As Evan reads the book, many mysteries emerge. Why was his father obsessed with this story? Why is his grandfather obsessed, too? And what is the truth inside these diary pages that were annotated, later on, by another visitor to that island?

Emperor is grounded in the fear of war and the haze of solitude and the ingenuity of survivors, both contemporary and historic. It is wholly conceived and executed, yet it trembles with mystery and a touch of magic. It is brilliantly structured but its power does not rest on its conceit. Tim may have pushed the narrative boundaries but he has not taken a single short cut, not expected the readers to follow just because he's feverently hoped they will. Every element adds to every element here. There are rewards for those who ponder, and, indeed, you could ponder all day and never find a fault line in this complex novel's execution.

Shadowshaper casts its own marvelous spell, builds its own mystique, is the sort of original work you would expect from an author who is also a musician who is also an EMT who is also a commentator on social order and disorder. Daniel has built a book about a young girl who discovers within herself a legacy power—and who must learn to harness it for a greater good. Sierra Santiago is a painter who can see, within the art of others, shadow lives and shapes, art that fades, murals that shed real tears. She is a daughter and a granddaughter in pursuit of hidden grace. She chases, and she is being chased. She rises to the challenge.

Sierra does all this within language steeped in salsa rhythms and Brooklyn gaits. She does this while pondering the color of her skin, the explosive nature of her hair, the discrete borders inside the border lands of race. Daniel is not just weaving a magical story here. He is telling his readers something about how it feels to live today within the fractures of society. About how it is to hope, despite the noise of now.

Authors of books that break the rules must know, to begin with, what the prevailing rules have been. They have a special obligation to steer their projects toward a higher grace, so that the strange ultimately does collide with a deep emotional truth, so that the fiction feels real, so that the experience of reading the story goes beyond admiration and straight into embrace. Fiction comes from a human place. The best fiction elevates the idea of the humane.

We'll talk about this and much more, I'm sure, at Book Fest. I'll learn; I'm sure of that, too.

Registration information for Book Fest is here.

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a most incredible Bank Street Book Fest

How lucky am I?

What an incredible line-up.

I will learn so much.

I am grateful.

Thank you, Jennifer Brown, Bank Street, and all those writers, reviewers, librarians, teachers, thinkers that I will learn from soon.

You can register at Bank Street College. And I hope you will.

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A few things happened while I was gone:

And so I share them here, briefly, for the day ahead is burstingly full of kitchen things, and family.

And so, first, my defense of memoir officially appeared in Printers Row/Chicago Tribune, with the really wonderful illustration above, by Robert Neubecker. I just had to share his work. The essay itself can be found here.

A condensed version of my Bank Street keynote—in which I focused on teaching the truth sideways—appeared on Huffington Post, here.

Kirkus Reviews released its online Best Children's Books of 2013, and Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent appears here, on the middle grade list.

And a story I wrote about my grandmother and her home on Guyer Avenue in southwest Philadelphia appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, along with this photograph of a time long ago. That essay can be found here.

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four women: looking back on conversations with Dani Shapiro, Liz Rosenberg, Stacey D'Erasmo, and Debbie Levy

My journey these past many months has been extraordinary—taking me to places far and wide, introducing me to writers and readers who embody the best of the now. For all of you who have taken the time to share some time with me: thank you.

I've been especially blessed by the opportunity to spend time in conversation with leading writers and thinkers. And so today, as I look toward one final Handling the Truth event in the year of 2013 (more on that below), I want to say a special thank you to four women with whom I shared the stage and who were everything I'd hoped they'd be. And more.

Debbie Levy, author, most recently, of Imperfect Spiral, with whom I spent a sacred Saturday afternoon, in Alexandria, VA, talking about life and birds and truth in fiction. We gave our audience a few writing exercises; we engaged; we learned. And I adore Debbie Levy—an amazing talent and gift to younger readers.

Stacey D'Erasmo, author, most recently, of The Art of Intimacy, with whom I shared a stage at the Decatur Book Festival. Fiercely smart, hugely generous, Stacey is a writer I have read for a long time. I could not believe my great good fortune of just sitting and talking craft with her.

Liz Rosenberg, author, most recently, of The Laws of Gravity, who traveled all the way from her home in Binghamton to Mount Airy to spend a Saturday evening in a crowded independent bookstore to talk with me and with the audience about the book life. Liz and I have had a longstanding correspondence. How wonderful it was to spend some time together.

Dani Shapiro, author, most recently, of Still Writing, with whom I had the enormous pleasure of speaking last evening on behalf of First Person Arts. Dani and I had only met briefly once before. We'd talked once on the phone, emailed occasionally. But last night, in an intimate space, we shared a microphone and a passion for this writing life, and I felt as if I'd known her all my life. Dani traveled far to come to my city. She arrived in the company of her equally wonderful husband, the journalist and filmmaker Michael Maren, whose new film, "The Short History of Decay" (click on the link to see the trailer!), will be the featured film at several upcoming festivals. Philadelphians were blessed to have them both in the house. And so was I.

Thank you. And. That last 2013 Handling the Truth event? It's a First Person Arts Festival workshop called The Spices of Life. We're going to remember and write a kitchen scene. There are a few spaces left. Join us. 

Finally, that photograph above was taken by my friend Melissa Sarno on Saturday afternoon in the New York Public Library, following a really beautiful Bank Street morning. Jennifer M. Brown of Bank Street: You care about all the things that matter. You have a lot on your shoulders. Thank you for taking care of me.

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The Art of Writing the Personal: Dani Shapiro comes to Philadelphia (and thoughts on Slow Motion)

Yesterday, New York City beckoned—a chance to talk about some of the young people I've taught before a wonderful audience at Bank Street (thank you, Jennifer Brown), a review of Voice in a mentor workshop (we talked The Book Thief, Two Boys Kissing, Small Damages), a quick run through the wonderful exhibit of children's books at the New York Public Library with special people, lunch with my son and husband, a hurried walk through Hoboken, a drive back home in twilight hours.

Today, I travel to my city, Philadelphia, to spend time with the incredibly talented Dani Shapiro on behalf of the First Person Arts Festival. We'll be at Christ Church Neighborhood House (20 N. American Street) from 4 to 5:30. Tickets can be bought at the door. I hope to see you for many reasons, but mostly because of this: Dani Shapiro has something to say, she says it with profound intelligence, and this is a rare opportunity to see her in person in the City of Brotherly Love.

I've read Dani through the years. I've heard others talk about her generosity toward other writers, about her powers as a teacher, about the choices that she's made; I've watched her in conversation with Oprah. I've read and loved Devotion as well as Still Writing, Dani's newest book on the writing life. I've anticipated this conversation, I'm saying, for a long, good time.

But it was not until this morning that I read Slow Motion, Dani's bestselling memoir about the accident that changed her life. Dani was a young beauty mired inside an unwanted relationship with her good friend's stepfather when Dani's father and mother were involved in a car accident. Dani's father would ultimately, and somewhat mysteriously, pass away. Her mother would heal from 80 fractures—and premature widowhood. The boyfriend would want what such boyfriends want, and Dani—who had left Sarah Lawrence in pursuit of an acting career and of this relationship—would have to make choices about who she was, what she wanted, where her life was going.

I hadn't read Slow Motion because I wanted to know Dani first, to see her as a person first, and not as this defining story. And here is the spectacular thing about having just now read the final page: Slow Motion is one of those books that has earned every accolade it's ever gotten. The story itself is remarkable. But what I believe is even more remarkable is the way that Dani tells it—her use of time, her measures of distance, her patience with the story itself, her silken language. Many may read Slow Motion for the story, but I read for the artistry.

And I was not disappointed by a single page.

Here is Dani, toward the end of the book—re-enrolled in college, emerging, at last, as the writer she must have always been. Dani has musical training in her background. Her sentences are the proof of this:

The professor sits back as the students finally start speaking. Until now, I have been the quiet one in the class, too insecure and frightened to say a word. But today, something begins to shift. I see that there might be some way I can take the raw material of my life and transform it into something that transcends my own experience. I can organize the noise in my head into something that has order and structure. I can make sense of what, until now, has been senseless.

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at work on a keynote, and congratulating Cat Mosier-Mills, selected as a finalist for 2014 YoungArts

This morning I'm again at work on the keynote talk I'll be giving this weekend in New York City at the Bank Street Mini-Conference. I have something to say about the sideways process. I have something to learn from my fellow participants—Roger Sutton (The Horn Book), Vicky Smith (Kirkus Reviews), Luann Toth (School Library Journal), and Sarah Smith (children's editor of The New York Times Book Review), not to mention the show's creator, Jennifer Brown.

As I work, I am reflecting back on the students I've met along the way. The young people I have loved and who have taught me most of everything.

I share this photograph this morning, of a particular morning in Miami with the YoungArts writers, both because it reminds me of a very happy time and because a very special young woman—Cat Mosier-Mills—has just been named a writing finalist for 2014 YoungArts. Cat is the daughter of my friends Elizabeth Mosier and Chris Mills. She is a young person I had fervently hoped would have the opportunity to experience the wealth of talent in the multiple disciplines—cinematography, dance, voice, and many others—that YoungArts brings together. Cat is the perfect contributor to a world like this one, and she will, in her own poised, never blaring, always thoughtful way, shine her own bright light.

So today I am looking back and I am looking forward, and I am thinking sideways. I am thinking about gorgeous Cat, and the journey she's about to go on. I am grateful for organizations that care about our children and the talents that they have.

There's still time to register for the Bank Street Mini Conference. I hope to see you there.

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Handling the Truth: The Shelf Awareness Review (oh!)

Last night, as I sat waiting for the curtains to rise on the 50th season of Pennsylvania Ballet—as I sat waiting, especially, for the gorgeous (inside and out) Julie Diana and her wonderful husband, Zachary Hench, to dance "Diamonds," a piece I had watched them rehearse a week or so before—I thought, Stop, Beth. Live this moment. Don't let it rush by.

I sat on the edge of my seat. I sat watching through streaming tears. This ballerina and her husband and that corps. The exhilarating precision and grace and humanity of it all. When art finds you, let yourself be found. Stop hurrying. Be.

Oh, how they danced. How exquisite Julie is. How other-worldly talented is her Zak. How right they are together.

This morning, too, I am stopping. I am putting aside the hurry of corporate work for just this hour and allowing myself to feel grateful for the journey I have lately been on. So many of you have been so kind to me, and have I thanked you enough? I have met such interesting people along the Handling the Truth way. Just this week I talked to the great Barbara DeMarco-Barrett, and now I look ahead to weekend conversations with Liz Rosenberg (at Big Blue Marble Bookstore, in Mount Airy) and fellow memoir summitters (at Rosemont College). I look ahead to a fantastic, multi-tiered event at Bank Street in New York City, created by the Ambassador of Children's Books (my title for her), Jennifer M. Brown, and to a conversation with Dani Shapiro as part of the First Person Arts Festival. I look toward a conversation at Kelly Writers House (and a radio recording) and a conversation on behalf of Kelly Writers House (off Rittenhouse Square), and to more workshops, and to my upcoming road trip with the fabulous A.S. King, as we join the Pennsylvania Library Association (and others of our writing friends) in western Pennsylvania.

In any life, this would be a lot. In my life, it is huge. And again: Have I thanked all of you enough?

My gratitude is here. My gratitude is huge. And I am giving this particular hour over to my gratitude (not a big enough word) to Jennifer M. Brown, who has just now posted this beautiful review of Handling the Truth in today's Shelf Awareness. Jenny and I, we just love books. We can't help ourselves. And I adore Jenny. That's just how it is and will be.

My cup runneth over.

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