UNDERCOVER and Mary Oliver

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.

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HOUSE OF DANCE

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.

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On Making Judgments: Looking Back on the 2001 National Book Awards/Young People's Literature

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.

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Beginnings

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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