the power of thank you

It has been a fall of vast proportions and very little sleep and soon, soon, I will sit very quietly in a still and silent spot and reflect upon it all. What have I learned? What lessons carry forward?

But there is no need to find a quiet space to reflect upon this: the power of thank you. That simple truth—so well known, so often disregarded—was reinvented for me yesterday by the arrival of a yellow-brown envelope from the Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church Tutoring Center, which I had visited two consecutive Tuesday evenings not long ago. I had met with the children of West Philadelphia and their tutors. I had to read to them from books by Jacqueline Woodson, Sandra Cisneros, and others. I had talked to them about language, and what it can do, and then the children had written stories for me. Stood up before their friends and let their dreams ring out.

The joy during those two evenings was palpable. I wrote of one young writer on my blog. I left, and I left them to their stories, but I did not forget their hearts, their faces.

Yesterday, in that envelope, I received their notes, their kindness, their sprawling enthusiasm, their books of dreams, and one fine Thanksgiving turkey. I received the autographs of aspiring writers and inspired readers and home builders. I received these words: "I am really excited that you put me on your blog. That was the best thing that ever happened to me in my life."

The keepsake of this whirring fall. The authenticity that lives in children.

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bulletproof windows, shaped like hearts, in last night's workshop with West Philly kids

She had been driven, with the other fourth and fifth graders, through rain and across the slick of leaves from West Philadelphia toward an old stone building in Bryn Mawr. She sat on the floor with a wide gold band on her head and a pencil in her hand. I was asking her (the others, too) to think about home—what it is. I was asking for specifics—the sounds in the streets, the light in the house, the color of the flowers in the pot. I was reading a little Julia Alvarez, a little Sandra Cisneros, a little Jacqueline Woodson, a little Charles Blow. Tell me what you are hearing, I said. Tell me which details make these memories of homes and houses particular for you.

Many hands up. Many questions. Many details.

Then, toward the end, I asked the children to imagine their someday house—where will you live when you are ten or fifteen years older than you are today? Some wrote a sentence. Some worked with their tutors to write more. This little girl with the golden hairband wrote, on her own, an entire page and a half.

She wanted to read it aloud.

I said yes. Quieted the room.

Her home of the future would have candy walls. It would have yellow, purple, orange, red, TVs, a place for everyone she loves. It would have (this was a final detail) bulletproof windows that were shaped like hearts.

Are you going to be a writer? I asked her. Oh, yes. She said. What do you read? I asked her. Junie B., she said, and (her favorite book of all) the dictionary.

Next week maybe I'll tell her that when I was her age I dreamed of being a writer, too. That being a writer is possible. That anyone who conjures candy walls and heart-shaped bulletproof windows is a heroine of mine. Next week, when she returns, with another story.

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taking HANDLING (and memoirs I've loved) to Moravian Academy in Bethlehem, PA

In an hour I'll set out for Bethlehem, PA, where I'll spend the day at Moravian Academy, a high school that has dedicated much of this year to stories of self and memory and that selected Handling the Truth as its all-school read as part of the process.

Moravian also invited students and faculty to read three memoirs I recommended—The Answer to The Riddle is Me (David Stuart MacLean), Brown Girl Dreaming (Jacqueline Woodson), and Gabriel (Edward Hirsch).

We'll begin with an all-school assembly and a conversation about non-traditional forms. I'll then travel to two sophomore-level classrooms to workshop emerging student ideas and to talk more deeply about the making of truth.

A day I have anticipated happily for several months now is about to begin.

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when diversity is not a strategy but an essential element of the story being told: Blue Birds by Caroline Starr Rose

We Need Diverse Books. We absolutely do. Books that don't merely place a "non-mainstream" character into the story for the sake of inclusion. Books that go much deeper than the announcement of, or allusion to, skin color, origin countries, sexual preferences. Books that don't operate as if conforming to PC checklists. Books that function outside the circle of slogans and tell real stories.

Truly diverse books are books in which the culture and cultural heritage and economics of the characters are essential to the story being told. They explore wide ranging personages, languages, histories, orientations, dreams. They are steeped in the particular social and personal pressures faced by very particular (and particularly well-drawn) characters. They introduce characters that seem to live not just on the page, but off it.

Middle grade/YA novels such as Ann E. Burg's Serafina's Promise, Thanhha Lai's Inside Out and Back Again, Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming, Kwame Alexander's Crossover, A.S. King's Ask the Passengers, and Patricia McCormick's Never Fall Down and Sold have, among many other titles, introduced lasting, fully dimensional, diverse characters to younger readers. With her second stunning middle grade novel, Blue Birds, Caroline Starr Rose has made another important addition to this canon.

Blue Birds is a novel in verse that explores a little-known chapter of American history concerning the "Lost Colony" of Roanoke. It's late in the 16th century. English explorers have arrived to Roanoke Island, off Virginia. Conflict and distrust erupt among the native tribes and the English.

Into this setting Rose has placed two young girls—Alis, from England, and Kimi, a Roanoke who has watched the English bring disease and disaster to her world. Out on her own, Alis discovers the natural beauty of the place. Watching, Kimi must decide whether or not to trust this fair-skinned creature. Will Alis and Kimi be able to peel back the social prejudice and befriend one another? Will they be able to step over the great divide that rises whenever individual people are presented with difference? And what will they do—what can they do—as tensions mount in their respective communities?

Rose has given us a complex story, a real and researched story, a story that, despite its roots in late 16th century America, feels contemporary. The questions about other are neither dodged nor trumped, and they never feel commercially strategic. The questions arise because such questions naturally do, because this is the story Starr is telling. And look how gracefully and honestly she tells it:

Why do they dress as they do?
To speak their language,
does it feel as it sounds,
like sharpened rocks on  your tongue?
What makes their skin
the color of a snake's underside?
Why do the men not keep their faces smooth
but grow hair from their cheeks?
Do they ever bathe?
For their strong odor lingers
long after they've gone.

Though they
have brought us heartache,
must all of them
be enemies?

In bringing readers Alis and Kimi, Starr has not just brought us a distant era. She's brought her readers a way of sinking in with real questions about difference—and a credible suggestion that such differences might be overcome.

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When the poem is the elegy and the elegy is the memoir: Gabriel: A Poem/Edward Hirsch

This morning, before the gears on the work-a-day-world began to turn in earnest, I read "Gabriel: A Poem," Edward Hirsch's book-length elegy for his departed son.

It is hallowed and hollowing, a work of pristine mourning. Memories seamed and broken. Threads that fall away until we see the soul of the boy himself— adopted, challenged by tics and relentless recklessness, the bright splash in a room. He is a child no one can keep safe from himself. A child who goes out during Storm Irene to a party he sees advertised on Craigslist. A child who does not return and cannot be found for four terrible days.

And then he must be buried.

It ransacks the soul, reading a book like this. We peel away as the lines peel away; no periods at the end of any line, no finished sentences. We look and we cannot stop looking until Gabriel, and his searching father, are a part of us.

It is a poem. It is also memoir. Like Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming it suggests, again, another form for the hardest and most important stories lived. The most important things lost and lifted to the page.

Words:

In his country
There were scenes
Of spectacular carnage

Hurricanes welcomed him
He adored typhoons and tornadoes
Furies unleashed

Houses lifted up
And carried to the sea
Uncontained uncontainable

Unbolt the doors
Fling open the gates
Here he comes

Chaotic wind of the gods
He was trouble
But he was our trouble

With thanks to Nathaniel Popkin, whose craft essay in Cleaver Magazine last week reminded me that I had meant to buy and read this.

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Brown Girl Dreaming/Jacqueline Woodson: a whole story, a lesson on writing

This morning I have been raised up by Brown Girl Dreaming, Jacqueline Woodson's masterpiece. I have sat with her poems and her life on my lap, seeing with greatest clarity. A story of growing up in the south and in the north, of reading slow and remembering deep, of telling stories that might have been as if they happened yesterday. Life is apportioned but it must be lived whole. In fractions we find our trembling unities. In love, our idea of home.

This is Woodson's story. But it's also the way she tells the story, the deep, clean beauty in the lines, the wisdom in the narrative idea, the authenticity of the recurring themes, not a single (bless her) gimmick. It's how she speaks for all of us, how she makes us want (at once) to pass her story on. It's how she  makes me remember, when I read her book, sitting in the back of a teacher's conference in Boston, only last year, with Nancy Paulsen, Woodson's editor, beside me (Nancy Paulsen Books/Penguin). Woodson was on the stage. Paulsen was smiling.

"She's written such a beautiful book," Paulsen leaned over and whispered, and I said (all honestly), "I have no doubt."

Not one.

Have no doubt about this book. Read (if you haven't already) the whole, but start with this single page called "writing # 1." It, like the entirety of Brown Girl Dreaming, calls to all of us:

writing #1

It's easier to make up stories
than it is to write them down. When I speak,
the words come pouring out of me. The story
wakes up and walks all over the room. Sits in a chair,
crosses one leg over the other, says,
Let me introduce myself. Then just starts going on and on.
But as I bend over my composition notebook,
only my name
comes quickly. Each letter, neatly printed
between the pale blue lines. Then white
space and air and me wondering, How do I
spell introduce? Trying again and again
until there is nothing but pink
bits of eraser and a hole now
where a story should be.

Perfection? I think so.

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No Such Thing as the Real World: A Book is Born, a Possibility (i.e., Teen Writing Competition) Sounds

Today is April 21, which is another way of saying that today is the birthday of No Such Thing as the Real World, a HarperTeen anthology that bears the subtitle: Stories about growing up and getting a life. "What's the line that separates childhood from the 'real world'? the back jacket asks. "And what happens when it's nothing you imagined it would be?"

There are six of us telling stories here—An Na, M.T. Anderson, K.L. Going, Chris Lynch, Jacqueline Woodson, and myself—and it is a very happy thing for me to be nested in with such a crowd. But wait, there's more: This anthology is designed to celebrate teen writers, too, by encouraging them (to quote the back jacket again) "to write their own stories about experiencing the real world for the first time. The winning story will be published in the paperback edition of the book." For details, go here.

I repeat: This book is an open invitation to you teens out there, you most exquisite writers. You know who you are, too, because I'm often on your blogs, awed and admiring.

Here are a few words from the middle of my story, which is titled "The Longest Distance."

Annie and Marne will never have what Joelle and I surely did. They may be laughing behind their hands, but their laughs are little kaput laughs, over before they get started. They’re practically flirty with each other, silly, the oh-my-God kind of girls, and they were always like that—on the bus, in the cafeteria, at football games—always making a show of themselves, like they were posing for reality TV. Except they weren’t like that the day I climbed back on the bus, a week after Joelle disappeared. They just stared at me then, with their hazel and brown eyes. “Hannah,” they said, both of them turned around, both of them staring open-mouthed at me. “Why did she do it?”

“Because she did,” is what I said. And closed my arms across my chest and stared out the window. All the regular things in the neighborhood went by. They looked blurry to me, underwater. I’ve worn sunglasses to school every day ever since. No one needs to know how I am feeling.

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The Longest Distance (short story excerpt)

Even when you don’t ask you have asked by the way you look at me—by how you try to hold my eye, try to suggest (a touching gesture) that it is concern you feel, not curiosity. But if I had answers don’t you think that I’d confess them? That I’d have said by now, put out a proclamation, that Joelle died for this, or for that. That she died because. All I can tell you is what you know, which is: Joelle is gone. She’s the slash of black you see just after lightning breaks the sky. She’s the place where a cliff stops being stone and becomes the air that you could fall through.

From "The Longest Distance," a short story soon forthcoming in No Such Thing as the Real World, a HarperTeen collection also featuring An Na, M.T. Anderson, K.L. Going, Chris Lynch, and Jacqueline Woodson. And who had the idea for the anthology in the first place? Why, Miss Jill Santopolo, of course.

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