Archive | Big Green Pocketbook

No Wraiths or Fetches Necessary

To celebrate our fortieth anniversary this year, we decided to take a Big Trip. My husband suggested Paris. “Cornwall,” I said. “Someplace old.” Not that Paris isn’t old. Instead of a crowded city, I wanted winkles and pasties, lost gardens and standing stones, piskies and Tintagel castle. He agreed and I began putting together a trip that would send us back in time.

My motives weren’t entirely pure. True, I’ve been an Anglophile ever since I read the British children’s fantasy Hubble’s Bubble at the age of eleven and started saving pennies to go to Wales and Scotland. Currently I’m writing my first magical realism middle-grade novel. Building the world of my story has taken nearly three years, yet the book’s foundation feels as stable as shivering sands. By tramping over ancient lands, I hoped Cornwall’s mythology would seep through the soles of my Sketchers and I’d bring some back with me.

As much as I love America’s history and varied landscapes, I fret that the U.S. isn’t—well, Britain. America has, as New England fantasy writer Jane Langton once wrote, “less history to draw on … It is bald of mythology, bare of folk tale. Its open fields are not marked by standing stones.” We do have Native American folklore and the tall tale adventures of larger-than-life characters such as Paul Bunyan and John Henry. But those stories are not part of my background.

Langton’s essay is more than thirty years old and much has changed. Many fantasies today give readers passports to worlds beyond medieval Europe, inspired by African, Asian, and indigenous American cultures. My book is set in Virginia, deeply linked to my English roots, a place and voice I know. But Virginia has no dead kings buried with broken swords, no sleeping dragons under the hill, no fairies. How will I saturate the landscape with magic?

When I think back, I didn’t always notice the settings of childhood books. The opening line of Edward Eager’s Seven-Day Magic hooked me right away. “‘The best kind of book,’” said Barnaby, “‘is a magic book.’” I agreed and ripped through the Half-Magic series, not caring that the books are placed vaguely in America (Ohio and Connecticut, Eager’s stomping grounds).

Midwesterner Eager grew up with the Oz books, the first true American fantasies for children. When he had his own children, he discovered E. Nesbit’s books, which he praised for the “dailiness of the magic. Here is no land of dragons and ogres or Mock Turtles and Tin Woodmen … The world of E. Nesbit is the ordinary or garden world we know, with just the right pinch of magic added.” Everyday magic, set wherever, suited me fine.

Yet when I found Jane Langton’s A Diamond in the Window, I met an opening that left no question about its setting: “Edward Hall sat under the front porch of the big house on Walden Street in Concord, Massachusetts, and thought about his two ambitions in life.” By page 4, I’d learned Concord was the site of the first battle of the Revolutionary War, Walden Pond was nearby, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, and Henry David Thoreau, whoever they were, had lived there. This Virginia kid, clueless about New England, was intrigued. Not far into the story—a delightful combination of fantasy and mystery—the children’s naïve Uncle Freddy quotes Emerson to the trash collector:

“Oh, call not Nature dumb!
The trees and stones are audible to me …”

It’s a funny scene, but the quote set me to wondering. I’d often thought trees talked (it turns out they do!) and sometimes worried when I walked on rocks—did they hurt? The Diamond in the Window has magic, but it also has nature, which was more accessible to me. As a child, there was so much I wanted to know about the ground beneath my feet, the trees stretching toward the sky, the clouds and weather.

In Langton’s essay, she admits British fantasy writers can tap into “the thick intertwining of field and forest with myth and history.” She mentions that Scottish writer Mollie Hunter once told her that fantasy “could only be composed by someone standing upon a countryside drenched in myth and folklore.” Really? I went flying to an essay by Mollie Hunter in which she credits legends, “a succession of folk memories filtered through the storyteller’s imagination,” as the basis for true fantasies.

Virginia, I’m afraid, sadly lacks supernatural beings such as Celtic fetches and wraiths. But it has an abundance of nature, the kind E.B. White tapped into by watching ordinary spiders and pigs and rats at his Maine farm. Langton argues that “nature taken pure, nature in its simplicity and silent grandeur” carries its own brand of magic. Instead of longing for standing stones, I’ll be happy to extract “marveling wonderment” from the seashell-capped Blue Ridge Mountains, horse-pastured Piedmont, and osprey-nested Chesapeake Bay.

As for Cornwall, we discovered that the five-hour car trip after an overnight flight to Heathrow, in which the only age-qualified driver (who can barely park her small pickup) would never manage driving stick-shift from the left seat on the left-hand side of the road. It’s okay. We will gladly take a bus from London to Stonehenge. My Sketchers will never know the difference.

Enchanted Points of Entry

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My first glimpse of Margaret Wise Brown’s house on Vinalhaven Island, Maine, was from a boat. It topped a granite slope, clapboard siding painted the same gray-blue as the sparkling Hurricane Sound. I was so excited I nearly fell overboard. We’d just passed the Little Island that Margaret had made famous in her Caldecott-winning book and I’d spotted a seal dozing on the rocks.

Margaret’s Only House was not the only house on that end of the island, but it was to me. I’d been working on a biography of Brown and was looking for the real Margaret. My pilgrimage to Only House was professional, primary research. I came to Margaret’s work as an adult and placed her in her house, not myself as a child in the fictional site of one of her books.

I was not a Potter fan clamoring to find Platform 9 ¾ at King’s Cross station, or someone with fond memories of Eloise scoping out the lobby of the Plaza. As a kid, I longed to see Sleepyside-on-the-Hudson, the fictional setting of my beloved Trixie Belden mysteries, because I believed it was real. Recently I learned the village was real, based on Ossining, New York, where the author had lived.

Each year, thousands tour literary houses such as the Bronte Parsonage in Yorkshire or Hemingway’s home in Key West. When I went to Concord, Massachusetts, I waded in Walden Pond in honor of Thoreau, an author I admire as an adult. I think it requires a different mind-set to visit the fictional sites of favorite children’s books and come away satisfied.

If you loved the Anne of Green Gables books, a trip to Prince Edward Island may disappoint with its busloads of tourists and modern interpretive exhibits. However, children still reading those books might eagerly embrace fiction and reality in that liminal space, thrilled to see Anne’s tiny bedroom with her stockings draped over the bedstead. Scholars maintain that when children visit literary sites, the experience enhances re-readings of those books.

But how do adults fare on these journeys? I loved Wendy McClure’s The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie. The Little House books McClure devoured as a child carried her to new places, new sights, new adventures. She found in those landscapes “enchanted points of entry into a fantasy world,” as Nicola Watson writes in The Literary Tourist.

McClure craved to churn butter and play with a corncob doll. She imagined helping Laura—magically transported to the 1970s—on the escalators of North Riverside Mall. Then, like so many of us, she grew up and left her childhood book friend behind. After the death of her mother, McClure re-read the books and decided to trace Laura’s path, homestead by homestead.

The Wilder Life concludes with McClure remembering the different houses her mother, who grew up in a move-every-few-years-military family, tracked down on summer vacations. “I … thought of Laura, too, of one little house after another forming the story of a life.” At last she declared to her patient husband that they were done Laura-jaunting. Home was with him, she realized. Time to re-enter the story of their life together.

Sarah Maslin Nir recounts a different experience in her New York Times article, “All the Pretty Ponies.” Growing up “mostly horseless” in New York City, she traveled to Chincoteague Island, Virginia, on the trail of Marguerite Henry’s Misty of Chincoteague. Misty had “stoked [her] equestrian fantasies as a girl. Maslin Nir arrived during Pony-Penning Days, when the wild horses swim from Assateague Island to Chincoteague to be auctioned, a tradition dating from 1925 to thin the herd and raise funds for the fire department.

She sat on her hands during the auction to keep from bidding on adorable, shaggy ponies. Then she visited the Museum of Chincoteague Island and saw taxidermied Misty on display. The experience was “crushing.” When she learned that Misty had never been a wild pony, she knew “the creature Henry had conjured on the page had never really lived.” She bought a copy of Misty of Chincoteague as a souvenir of her trip, preferring her childhood version to reality.

When we as adults try to repossess a fictional landscape that meant everything to us as children, we risk trampling the enchanted point of entry. On my trip to Concord, I was sorely tempted. Not only is Concord the home of Emerson, Thoreau, and the Alcotts, it was also the setting of my favorite childhood book, The Diamond in the Window, by Jane Langton. The neo-Gothic house depicted on the cover was on 148 Walden Street. I could go there. I could take a picture!

The lure was powerful. But I know that wonderful old houses were often parceled into apartments, added on to, changed. I didn’t couldn’t bear to see Eric Blegvad’s 1961 illustration marred by the 21st century.

In his 1935 travel memoir, In Search of England, H.V. Morton climbed the rock steps to Tintagel, the rumored birthplace of King Arthur, even though he felt the castle “was one of those places which no man should see.” Tintagel wasn’t the gaunt rocky ruins, but “a country of dreams more real than reality.” Exactly so.

Not everything has to be seen, not every speck of curiosity must be satisfied, especially in a world where Google provides the answer to anything. I remembered my first reading of Diamond, that singular moment when my imagination sprouted wings and I soared into the clouds. I didn’t go to 148 Walden Street. I would not ruin the memory.

Richard Adams Gave Me Rabbits

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Knee-deep in spring! The rabbits will be here soon, rangy after a long winter. They like our yard because we have low bushes good for hiding and we let the lawn go to clover and dandelions. I like to think rabbits feel safe because they have little chance elsewhere. If ever there was an animal with “a thousand enemies,” it’s the cottontail rabbit, a creature I never paid much attention to until Watership Down.

I found Watership Down in 1974. I was twenty-two, still in the thrall of The Lord of the Rings and The Once and Future King yet feeling jaded that the world was nothing like Middle-earth or Gramerye. One day on my lunch hour, I walked into Woodward & Lothrop to browse the book department. On display were stacks of a new novel with a compass rose and a rabbit on the cover. It was thick—over 400 pages—British, and a fantasy. The hardcover cost $6.95, a fortune on my secretary’s salary, but I bought it. At work I kept the book on my knees, sliding out from my desk to sneak-read when no one was looking.

With the first foreboding sentence, “The primroses were over,” I knew this was not a story about bunnies. It was darker, sharper, and exactly what I needed. At that time, my life seemed all edges and uncertainty. I felt a lot like Fiver, the nervous “outskirter” (in the hierarchy of Adams’ rabbits, outskirters lacked aristocratic parentage, weight, and strength). I wanted to write for children, but, more than two years out of high school, couldn’t seem to move forward. Was I doomed to type other people’s words forever?

I learned that the author, Richard Adams, worked for the civil service and didn’t start writing until he was fifty. Watership Down began as a tale he told his daughters on a drive to Stratford-on-Avon. They urged him to write the story—it took two years. After fourteen rejections, a small publisher printed 2500 copies. The book became an instant classic, allowing Richard Adams to quit his job and write full-time.

The book won the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. A reviewer for The Economist declared, “If there is no place for Watership Down in children’s bookshops, then children’s literature is dead.” I’ve never felt it is a children’s book, but that could be because I came to it as an adult. Adams himself refused to pin down the book’s intended audience: “What age-group is it aimed at?” someone would ask. “I don’t aim it, madam. It just goes off by itself.”

Adams credits Ronald Lockley’s The Private Life of the Rabbit for natural history details, but in aiming for the truth in his story, he drew upon his childhood love of Walter de la Mare’s poetry, especially “The Children of Stare”:

‘Tis strange to see young children
In such a wintry house;
Like rabbits’ on the frozen snow
Their telltale footprints go.

His reaction to the poem: “Cold, ghosts, grief, pain and loss stand all about the little cocoon of bright warmth, which is everywhere pierced by a wild, numinous beauty, catalyst of fear and weeping.” The poem was far from comforting, but it told the truth, and led Adams to tackle “the really unanswerable things” in Watership Down, which is also about grief, pain, and loss, while everywhere pierced by a wild, numinous beauty.

Watership Down changed my life (the last book to do so). I never saw rabbits—or the natural world—the same way again. I turned to the works of Rachel Carson and Hal Borland.

I took notice of the environment. And I watched rabbits during evening silflay, Lapine for feeding above-ground.

Rabbits kept me grounded to the planet. I bought rabbit garden statuary, rabbit figurines and paintings. A framed poster of Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait’s Rabbits on a Log hangs in our bathroom. The porch is inhabited by rabbits, and each spring I buy new pieces of rabbit-themed china.

In the public domain, Rabbits on a Log by Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, 1897, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, accession 1979.490.7

In 1978, before we were married, my fiancé and I saw the beautifully-animated (and not for kids) movie. When Art Garfunkel began singing “Bright Eyes” at the death of main character Hazel, I cried so hard my fiancé almost called an ambulance (yet still married me). I still haven’t gotten over it.

Richard Adams gave me rabbits, but he also gave me direction. I decided to get a move on with my career. Instead of shopping on my lunch hour, I went to the library, staked out a table in the children’s room, and wrote stories. My first children’s magazine sale came from a lunch time work session.

Most of all, Richard Adams gave me humanity. Through his band of small, ordinary animals facing homelessness and survival, I saw myself, also small and ordinary, as a storytelling animal. I give mysteries, fantasy, historical fiction, biographies, and contemporary tales to children. One day, those readers will tell their own stories. Maybe even about rabbits.

On the Way to East Dene

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One day during this dreary Virginia winter, I came across a talk by Susan Cooper, given at Simmons College in 1980. The talk was titled, “Nahum Tarune’s Book.” To explain the title, she begins by quoting an astonishing passage from the introduction of Come Hither by Walter de la Mare, an anthology of poetry first published in 1923:

In my rovings and ramblings as a boy I had often skirted the old stone house in the hollow. But my first clear remembrance of it is of a hot summer’s day. I had climbed to the crest of a hill and stood looking down on its grey walls and chimneys as if out of a dream. And as if out of a dream already familiar to me.

My real intention in setting out from home that morning had been to get to a place called East Dene. My mother had often spoken to me of East Dene—of its trees and waters and green pastures, and the rare birds and flowers to be found there. Ages ago, she told me an ancestor of our family had dwelt in this place.

Susan Cooper came to Come Hither when she was fourteen. She kept a copy of “this wonder for thirty years and must have turned to it at least as many times each year. It is my talisman, my haunting: a distillation of all the books to which I’ve responded most deeply …”

“I own a few de la Mare poetry collections—Songs of Childhood (1902) and Peacock Pie (1913). His work is mysterious and ethereal, earning him the mantle “poet of dusk.” Cooper hoped to capture de la Mare’s magic in her own work. (Her novel The Dark Is Rising won a Newbery Honor, and The Grey King was a Newbery Medalist—I’d say she’s done fairly well in the magic department.)

How fast did I order Come Hither? And when it came, this 800-page brick of a book, I leafed straight to the introduction, sinking deeply into the dreamy prose. Simon, the “rovings and ramblings” boy, describes the old stone house:

It was never the same for two hours together. I have seen it gathered close up in its hollow in the livid and coppery gloom of a storm; crouched like a hare in winter under a mask of snow; dark and silent beneath the changing sparkle of the stars; and like a palace out of an Arabian tale in the milky radiance of the moon. Thrae was the name inscribed on its gateway.

Simon meets the old lady of the house, Miss Taroone, who tells him of Sure Vine, which Simon believed was an ancestral mansion. The maid mentioned villages called Ten Laps, and how he might get to East Dene: through the quarry, by the pits, “and then you come to a Wall. And you climb over.” Then Simon hears of the boy Nahum Tarune. Exploring Nahum’s room in the stone tower, Simon is amazed by the fossils, rocks, nests, clocks, model ships, strange musical instruments, and a human skeleton. Bookcases cover the walls.

He digs out an old volume with Nahum’s hand-printed title: Theotherworlde. Inside, Nahum had copied poems—Shakespeare, Chaucer, Blake, Poe. Simon is not impressed. “‘Poetry!’ I would scoff to myself, and would shut up the covers of any such book with a kind of yawn inside me.” But then he begins to read.

I remember seeing Come Hither in my small elementary school library, the same edition I have now, printed in 1957 with decorations by Warren Chappell. Hungry for stories back then, I had no interest in poems. In high school, I grew slowly into poetry, falling hard for Frost, Sandburg, and, especially Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology.

Soon Simon does what Nahum Tarune did so many years ago—he copies the poems he likes best. He visits Thrae many times, often staying late. Once Miss Taroone warns him to leave: “There’s a heavy dew tonight, and the owls are busy.” Then comes the inevitable day when Simon must go to school and leave Thrae for good. But he keeps his book of poetry.

Susan Cooper points out the random notes that Simon scatters between the poems like coins. Ben Jonson’s “The Witches’ Song” spurred four dense pages of notes on the folklore and old names of plants. The next time I pick cat mint, I’ll think “Robin-run-in-the-hedge” instead. The introduction acts as a frame story—Simon copying the poems Nahum copied which ultimately became the book Come Hither. Like poetry, the frame story can be read on many levels, the meaning never the same twice.

Simon doesn’t see Nahum because, as Cooper clarifies, “he is all of us.” Nahum Tarune is an anagram of human nature. Thrae is earth, Ten Laps are the planets, Sure Vine is the universe. Miss Taroone is probably Mother Nature. And East Dene? Destiny.

I could see why Cooper dipped into Come Hither “sometimes for solace, sometimes for sunshine.” This great collection of words that Simon learns to read “very slowly, so as fully and quietly to fill up the time allowed for each line and to listen to its music,” to see even common and familiar things differently from the actual object. That is the power of poetry. On our way to East Dene, poetry helps us climb over the Wall.

April is National Poetry Month. Teachers everywhere will be introducing children to the works of Valerie Worth, David McCord, Shel Silverstein, Jack Prelutsky, Nikki Grimes, and many others. I’ll be reading Spoon River Anthology for the first time since high school, while waiting for a spring night when the dew is heavy, and the owls are busy.

The Arrow of Time

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When you walk into our house, you know immediately my husband and I are readers. The dining room is designated as the library, but there are bookcases and books in every single room, including the bathrooms. We subscribe to The Wall Street Journal and the Sunday New York Times, as well as Smithsonian, Audubon, and Sky and Telescope.

My husband has been teaching himself quantum physics the last few years. I take books to the movies. Yet we both would have failed the “Goldilocks effect” if that test had been given to us as young children. In her book, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction, Meghan Cox Gurdon discusses Dr. John Hutton’s research on how reading aloud to children affects their cognitive development.

Hutton, a pediatrician and professor at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, discovered through MRI scans that the brains of preschoolers who had been read to on a regular basis “lit up” in areas associated with language and processing information. Compared to peers who had little or no access to books, or who were given screens instead of sharing a picture book with a caregiver, the story-rich children were miles ahead in “language, emotional control, vision, hearing … laying the pathways for future thought and reasoning.”

The “Goldilocks effect” pertains to children age three to five, when their brains are growing fast. MRI scans showed “too hot” brain activity in children viewing videos. Not as terrific as it sounds, the watchers were actually passive. Audio—listening to stories through headphones—produced tepid reactions, “too cold.” The “just right” combination was being read to from a picture book. Children must process the pictures while listening. Their brains are engaged and active. And they have the added benefit of physical connection to a person.

When I read this study, I remembered my own years between two and five. There were no children’s books in the house I lived in. No one read to me. I was seldom spoken to and heard no stories. Howdy Doody and The Mickey Mouse Club (screen) kept me company. At the age of six, I entered first grade. The “look-say” or “whole word” method was still going strong. Reading didn’t click with me until second grade.

My husband was born in the Depression when children’s books were far down on the list of necessities. Next came the war, and his parents were busy with war work. He wasn’t read to and doesn’t remember any books until he started first grade. His stories came over radio waves (audio), Inner Sanctum and One Step Beyond.

I can’t say either of us grew up in a time of few distractions. For my husband, the war ruled everyone’s lives. By the time it was over, he was twelve, well past those vital development years. My life stabilized when I turned five, but my parents had multiple jobs. Learning to read and being exposed to books was left to teachers.

The Enchanted Hour covers other studies that prove the importance of reading aloud to young children, such as vocabulary. Reading two picture books aloud to a child each day for a year exposes him or her to more than 438,000 words of text. Catherine Tamis-LeMonda of New York University believes that picture book time is the only setting in which parent and child talk about things other than daily routines. Where else can you discuss the moon or elephants or how birthdays are celebrated in other countries?

The book includes test results of children in lower socioeconomic situations: book- and word-poor households. My background. And yet I did learn to read, though rather late. Once the door to stories was open, I read and wrote them. Library books had to be returned, but the stories I wrote were mine. No one could take them away from me.

My husband did fine in language arts, but his interests lay in mathematics and science. My mother wanted me to get a desk job. My husband’s father urged him to join his building business. Without encouragement, we found our own motivation and followed our own paths.

Gurdon’s book made me wistful. What would my life had been like if someone read me bedtime stories? If I was taken to the library? If someone stopped to listen to one of my own stories? But I can’t go back to my preschool years and fill that gap. The arrow of time—a theory developed by physicist Arthur Eddington in 1927—only moves in one direction, forward. The past is fixed and immutable.

I worry about children like me, growing up in word- and book-poor homes. The plea of The Enchanted Hour is for parents to carve out an hour a day to read aloud to their children. This isn’t a new idea. Jim Trelease’s 1979 The Read-Aloud Handbook paved that road for parents forty years ago. In 1998, Read to Your Bunny by Rosemary Wells was published as part of her initiative urging families to set aside twenty minutes a day of read-aloud time. Down from an hour to twenty minutes, and yet the problem still exists.

Here we are at the same crossroads, but now the enemy is screen time. No one reading this column is unaware that screens are in the hands of younger and younger children. I see babies with cellphones “to keep them quiet” and I see the expressionless faces of their parents, also on screens. Children in families that are poor in books but rich in screens—no matter where they land on the socioeconomic scale—will struggle to develop lively imaginations, to escape the pull of social media, to follow their own paths, with or without encouragement.

The arrow of time only moves in one direction, forward. Once passed by, those important years can’t be reclaimed and fixed.

When a Map Is a Journey

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The first map I remember was flashed briefly on TV, part of a commercial for Story Book Land. It aired on “Captain Tugg,” a local kiddie program. I adored Captain Tugg, so anything he endorsed must be gold. Like the home-movie type kid shows of the 50s and 60s, Story Book Land was a family-owned amusement park. And for my ninth birthday, I was going to Story Book Land!

The day of my trip brought a family crisis. After things had settled down, we went to Story Book Land. My mother sat on a bench while I followed the colored map given at the ticket booth to Robin Hood’s Tree House and Ali Baba’s Cave. The map promised adventure, but the park itself, with its fiberglass houses and nursery rhyme figures, fell short. This may have been my earliest experience with anticipation exceeding the actual event, yet my love for maps grew out of that disappointment.

The fantasy books I read abounded with maps. The Hobbit, Watership Down, The Phantom Tollbooth, The Wizard of Oz, the Narnia books, all provided maps to help readers picture imaginary worlds. As Richard Padron says in Maps: Finding Our Place in the World, “[verbal mapping does] not have the same impact, [or] provides quite the same experience. That impact has everything to do with the seductions of seeing a world that is not our own.”

I was enchanted with the map in Carol Kendall’s The Gammage Cup. Erik Blegvad’s drawing of The Land Between the Mountains gave me a sense of the topography, essential to understanding the story. My finger traced the river tumbling from Snowdrift Mountain to the forbidding Frostbite Mountains. The river was the source of life for the tiny Minnipins. If I ever found myself in the Land Between the Mountains, something I wished for mightily, I’d easily make my way to Slipper-on-the-Water, the best of the twelve villages. The map added to my reading experience, kept me anchored in that world longer, which was fine by me. My own world was a grease spot in the road in rural Fairfax County, sadly lacking rivers and mountains, giants and tiny people.

Land Between the Mountains map from The Gammage Cup

Map of the Land Between the Mountains from The Gammage Cup

Maps in contemporary fiction serve the same purpose. When I read The Long Secret, the sequel to Harriet the Spy, I entered a place as foreign as any fantasy: the hamlet of Watermill, Long Island. It was a stretch to navigate the references of well-heeled people, such as the fact Beth Ellen’s mother was in Biarritz. Was that a mental institution, I wondered? The map showed me that rich people lived in the country, too, if only “summering.” Meticulously rendered roads, houses, shops gave me confidence I could walk down Montauk Highway to Harriet’s or Beth Ellen’s house.

In a blog post on maps in literature, Nicholas Tam says, “Fictional maps introduce the complication of having, at minimum, two layers of authorship: the layer outside the text that has the power to dictate and reshape the world, and the layer that belongs to the reality of the world. The author is in the first and the characters are in the second.”

The map by Christopher Robin in Winnie-the-Pooh, with its childlike language (“100 Aker Wood,” “Floody Place”) lets readers believe the place is real because it was drawn by a peer. Christopher Robin may be a character in the story, but he is also a kid that readers can trust. I came to Winnie-the-Pooh as an adult, yet Hundred Acre Wood seemed real (it is!). It’s safe to assume that Tam’s second layer dominates the authorship of that map.

Yet authorship of a novel’s map isn’t always reliable. Look at Robert Lawson’s gorgeous endpapers for Rabbit Hill. Animals are depicted bigger than the landscape and buildings, certainly not to scale, though their larger-than-life size suggests their importance against the human backdrop. To the right, “Our Burrow” indicates the rabbit narrator drew the map. But would a childlike rabbit be able to create such a lovely piece of art? It’s clear to me that the first layer—the layer outside the text dictating and reshaping the world—is the author. This doesn’t bother me one whit. If Rabbit Hill is this dazzling, I’m ready to move there.

Robert Lawson’s map of The Hill from Rabbit Hill.

Maps in children’s books made me notice my own surroundings. Suddenly the grease spot in the middle of Lee Highway wasn’t that boring. Houses, barns, the auto garage, the motel, all were magic landmarks that I knew by their secrets. When I began writing for publication, I set most of my stories where I grew up, carrying in my head those houses and barns, long after I left, long after the place changed drastically. Their secrets stayed with me.

In Abi Elphinstone’s essay in The Writer’s Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands (brand-new and wonderful), she too uses the map of her childhood in her books. But she goes one step further, she draws her own maps, especially on “those days when the words sit stubbornly out of reach.” “I have never found myself at a loss when doodling an imagined world,” she says.

For my new work in progress, I’ve brought out colored pencils and Micron pens. I don’t draw that well, but I know my created world won’t be made of fiberglass.

Teaching Passion

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When the director of Hollins University’s graduate program in children’s literature asked me to teach a critical class on the history of children’s book illustrators, I said no. Even with an MFA in writing for children from Vermont College, an MA in children’s literature from Hollins, scores of published books, and years of teaching graduate-level creative classes, I still felt like a fraud. Someday I’d be called out because I never got an undergraduate degree or understood what “dialogic” meant. But the director insisted I was the only one who could teach this course, required for students in the new MFA Writing and Illustrating Children’s Books program.

Publishers Weekly cover illustration by Bill Peet

Maybe … When I was nineteen, I bought a children’s literature textbook at a yard sale. That one-dollar book became the first in my children’s literature library, with a heavy concentration in illustrators. What I lacked in academic experience, I could make up for in passion. As a kid, I longed to be an illustrator, switching to animation when I was a teenager. Those dreams never transpired, but my love for art stayed true.

Once home from that summer of teaching, I gathered my books on illustration. The floor nearly fell in! I had so much material, I didn’t need to leave my house. The course would begin with the earliest children’s book illustrators, up to the end of the twentieth century. Hollins summer residence terms are six weeks, two classes a week, each class three hours.

I would cover the early illustrators in the first class, then spend the rest of the term highlighting technique, printing methods, and ground-breaking artists. My outline looked deadly. I tossed it and any pretension I had of being a “real” academic. I’d teach the class the way I wish someone would have taught me—moving chronologically through time, giving backgrounds of illustrators, and, most important, telling stories along with showing the art. Students would get plenty of information, but they would also have a sense of the artists’ lives.

The outcome for the students? Rather than turn them into walking encyclopedias, I wanted them to fall in love. Fall for one illustrator, one artist that would change their lives, change the way they made their own art.

I began scanning illustrations for PowerPoint presentations. My little flatbed scanner hummed day after day until I had 1000 slides. A thousand! Even spread out over twelve classes, a thousand slides would send students flying for the exit. I cut and cut, until I had 500 slides. Well, they’d get their money’s worth.

“Monstrosities of 1825,” by George Cruikshank

On the first day of our class, I told the students to buckle up, their first lecture would be like a motorcycle ride through the Louvre. We covered 150 years of illustration, from the 1830s (George Cruikshank) to the 1930s (E.H. Shepard), criss-crossing between England and America. There were 75 slides, my script was 35 pages. Amazingly, they all came back for the next class.

“Toad told Rat all his adventures”, by Ernest H. Shepard, from The Wind in the Willows

Halfway through the term, I added another facet to the unit on mid-century illustrators. Artists who’d started at Disney Studios and gone on to produce children’s books—people like Bill Peet, the Provensens, and Gyo Fujikawa. Twelve classes was not enough! So, I created a thirteenth class, something no one had ever done before. Working around students’ schedules, we met during lunch. I opened the lecture up to everyone in our program. After that, other faculty members began holding lunchtime lectures.

from The Animal Fair, Alice and Martin Provensen, Golden Books

A Child’s Good Night Book, illustrated by Jean Charlot

Instead of a single text, students were required to discuss ten picture books I’d selected. Many had never seen Robert Lawson’s technically brilliant line-work for Ferdinand the Bull. They all knew Clement Hurd’s art for Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon but had missed Jean Charlot’s masterful pastels in A Child’s Good Night Book. Although I’d put together a zillion slides, I staggered into each class with more examples of the featured artist’s work. Slides are great, but nothing beats paging through actual books, most vintage or hard-to-find.

We had “special” days, such as sampling every black form of media I could lay my hands on for students to emulate Wanda Gag’s printer’s black. We ate blueberry Danish during the Robert McCloskey class. Students tore pieces of colored paper and made Leo Lionni-style collages as we discussed Little Blue and Little Yellow.

Katy and the Big Snow, written and illustrated by Virginia Lee Burton

Students began bringing in books from mad-dash trips home to share. They showed sketches in the style of Virginia Lee Burton or Donald Crews. And they did what I hoped—they fell in love.

After my initial run, I repeated the course every other year. Students proclaimed it was their very favorite class in the program. On the last day of the term, we traditionally eat Krispy Kreme donuts and I ask the students who they fell in love with during the term. Often, it’s more than one illustrator. Then there are hugs and heartfelt goodbyes, even a few tears.

Summer 2018 was the final time I taught that lovely course. After thirteen years at Hollins, I needed to spend summers home for personal reasons. Instead I’ll teach intensives at the university, as I have—and will continue to do—for other programs and organizations. As it turned out, my students changed my life, and teaching became my passion.

On the last day of my last illustration class, I gathered my materials one last time, looked around at the empty classroom where’d I’d taught so many years, and turned out the light. The tears were mine.

The Books We Keep Forever

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A few weeks ago, I stood at the corner of 37th and Madison Avenue in New York City and gazed longingly at the elegant pink marble building that housed J.P. Morgan’s library, now the Morgan Library and Museum. In late January 2019, the Morgan will host the “Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth” exhibit. I’m too early.

I only travel to New York every three or four years, but I’ll come back to see this exhibit, even if I have to crawl. You see, I read The Lord of the Rings when I was thirteen. Afterward, I moved to Middle-earth and stayed the next eleven years. I drew pictures of hobbits and Gandalf and thumbed to page 126 in The Return of the King again and again to experience the most thrilling sentence in English literature—“Rohan had come at last.”

I have several copies, including the 70s hardcover editions in slipcase, a heavy one-volume edition I read with the book propped on a pillow, and the movie-based versions. But the books I prize most are the 1967 Ballantine mass market paperback editions with Barbara Remington’s strange cover art. Originally, I checked out each volume from the library, read it in school, in bed, in the car, as I walked, and returned it feverishly praying the next volume would be on the shelves. When I found the paperbacks in the first bookstore in Fairfax, I nearly fainted. My very own Lord of the Rings!

The fantasy made me want to tell everyone about the trilogy and at the same time tell no one. I wanted Tolkien’s masterpiece all to myself. This is a common notion among bibliophiles. In her memoir, My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues, Pamela Paul writes, “I considered certain books mine, and the idea that other people liked them and thought of them as theirs felt like an intrusion.” I also wanted more Lord of the Rings, but there wasn’t any. And The Hobbit didn’t cut it.

Those paperbacks went everywhere with me, house to house, state to state. In each move, things got left behind: yearbooks, my high school diploma, my mother’s kitchen table, the dress I was married in (not a wedding dress). But never Lord of the Rings.

On my last morning in New York, I wandered around the Upper West Side with children walking to the various P.S.’s and private schools I’d read and wondered about in books like Harriet the Spy. They walked with parents and nannies and baby brothers. They walked with friends and dogs and siblings on scooters. These three children stayed ahead of me. At first I thought the boy was staring at a device. But he was reading a book! He wasn’t catching up on homework, he turned the pages too fervently. His book was so engrossing, he couldn’t put it down.

In an essay in the October Harper’s, William Gass writes of his beloved Treasure Island, a cheap paperback that saw him through “high school miseries,” went with him to college, and was stowed in his Navy duffle during WWII. Despite the yellowed, brittle pages, Gass admits, “That book and I loved each other.” He doesn’t mean the text, but the physical book. Books on a screen, he maintains, “have no materiality … off the screen they do not exist … they do not wait to be reseen, reread; they only wait to be remade, relit.” I can’t imagine squinting at The Lord of the Rings on a Kindle, trying to find page 126 in the third volume, unable to lose myself in Remington’s cover art that forms a triptych when the individual books are lined up.

As a child in the 80s, Pamela Paul sought vintage “yellow back” Nancy Drews. The original 30s blue spine books were too old, and the new paperbacks were “loathsome.” She preferred the 60s editions with their interior drawings and “broody cover paintings.” The quality of the paper, the binding glue, the end papers made the book a treasured object, “the vase as much a pleasure as the flowers.”

The books we keep forever are the ones we owned back when buying a book was a big deal. When we made the effort to track down special editions. When we would walk and read because the book would not leave our hands. I hope the book that New York schoolboy was reading was changing his life, that it was his, and that he would keep it forever, no matter where he went in life.

After high school, I got a job as a secretary. I hung a poster of Remington’s Lord of the Rings cover art over my desk. (Clearly, I was not your average secretary). At the age of 24, I decided it was time to leave Middle-earth. This coming January or February, I’ll return to New York to see Tolkien’s original papers and drawings and maps. Meanwhile, I’ll re-read my Ballantine paperbacks. The door to Middle-earth is always open.

Tonight is the Night …

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… when dead leaves fly like witches on switches across the sky …

In the center of our Wegman’s is all the stuff that is not food. Of course, I head there first. Browsing tea towels and sunflower coasters is my reward from having to shop in the too-big grocery store.

Recently I found a plate among the Halloween décor. I didn’t need a Halloween plate but this one made me stop. The design reminded me of the little treat bags people gave out on Halloween, filled with popcorn balls or homemade cookies (yes, the olden trick-or-treating days were better). Halloween was my favorite holiday when I was a kid. I pulled out my witch costume in August. I drew pictures of haunted houses. At nine, I wanted to be a witch living in a haunted house.

After I grew up, Halloween, slammed against Thanksgiving and Christmas, slid back. (Easter is now my favorite holiday, because you don’t have to do anything, because it’s spring, because the colors and bunnies are cheerful.)

As I stared at that orange and black plate, a door opened, just a sliver and just for an instant. I was nine again, flapping through our house in my purple (probably flammable) witch’s cape, eager for Halloween even though school hadn’t started yet. What a delicious feeling, all shivery and exciting at the same time. Then the door shut, and I had to think about lettuce and cat food and shower cleaner.

Although I’ve been writing children’s books for nearly forty years and have spent more years reading children’s books or writing about children’s literature, I have increasingly limited access to my own childhood. Memories fade due to age, medication, and Great Big World Problems. It’s harder to keep the door to childhood open when you’re worried about lab results, taxes, and fracking.

This past summer, I taught my last summer term at Hollins University. My final class in the Children’s Literature Graduate Program was the history of children’s book illustrators. My students, mostly young illustrators, settled into this course as if they’d come home.

They loved seeing the ground-breaking work of Wanda Gâg and Virginia Lee Burton. They loved the surprise of Leo Lionni and other modernists. They loved the versatility of Marcia Brown and the Dillons. In each class, a student would gasp or smile with recognition during the discussion of an artist or specific picture book. I could almost see the door swing open. “My mother read me that book!” Or, “My grandmother had that book! I forgot about it!”

Most of my students weren’t that far removed from their childhoods. But they were so tightly focused on learning craft and technique that they had lost track of why they chose this field. It’s not enough to “love children’s books” (though we do). As creators, we must stay connected to the child inside.

One of my students prefaced her final paper with this quote by Howard Pyle, illustrator and founder of the Brandywine School: “The stories of childhood leave an indelible impression, and their author always has a niche in the temple of memory from which the image is never cast out to be thrown on the rubbish heap of things that are outgrown and outlived.”

Those stories may be forgotten, buried at the bottom of memories that are more immediate, until the unexpected moment that single, indelible image rises to the top. For me, a $7 plate in a grocery store gave me a glimpse of past Octobers, and the memory of the books I read back then that let me experience shivery, exciting feelings any day of the year.

Yeah, I bought the plate I didn’t need, but somehow did. My old Halloween books keep it company, along with Harry Behn’s Halloween, illustrated by Greg Couch, a poem some of us remember from school …

…When elf and sprite flit through the night on a moony sheen.

It’s delightfully witchy—look the rest of it up for Halloween!

The Need for Secret Places

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In the fifth grade, my best friend and I discovered a tangle of honeysuckle in the scrubby woods bordering our school playground. It would make the perfect recess refuge. All we had to do was pull the honeysuckle from inside the circle of saplings it was twined around, leaving a curtain of vines.

The next day, we sprinted into the thicket and began ripping out vines. Honeysuckle, we learned, often grows with poison ivy. When we were no longer coated in calamine lotion, we finished our hideout. Each recess, we dashed down the hill when the teacher wasn’t looking and zipped into Honeysuckle Hideout. Having a secret place at school, where we were corralled by adults, gave us an exhilarating sense of freedom.

Until the day three sixth graders invaded our Hideout. The presence of sneering, older girls shattered our privacy. Our haven suddenly seemed childish and the power we’d felt spying on others diminished in an instant. We were back in the general population of ordinary kids.

Although I had my own room at home, I made a den from a blanket-covered card table, cobbled a makeshift playhouse inside my closet, and claimed the nook behind the furnace in our basement. In these places I felt safe and secluded. The books I read fueled the need for secrecy: the gatehouse-turned-clubhouse in the Trixie Belden mysteries, the Melendy siblings’ Office in The Saturdays, the dumbwaiter Harriet the Spy squeezed into, the Borrowers’ realm beneath the floorboards.

Once, I spread a tarp inside a roll of unused chicken wire sitting along one side of our garden. I crawled inside. Ragweed and tall grass cloaked the fence roll from view. The tarp floor smelled musty. I tucked a box of Milk Duds and my library book in a fold at one end. The cat joined me. We whiled away summer afternoons as bumblebees drowsed in the clover and a thrush sang sweetly deep in the woods.

I didn’t know then that place-making helped connect me to the planet. Quiet and hidden, I began to understand I was part of the larger space shared by the bumblebees, the thrush, and the cat. I continued to create these sanctuaries no matter where I lived. As poet Kim Stafford said in his essay, “A Separate Hearth:” I would take any refuge from the thoroughfare of plain living … there I pledged allegiance to what I knew, as opposed to what was common.

The geography of our pasts is littered with snow forts and retreats beneath rhododendron bushes, tree houses and havens under front porches. Secret spaces, no matter how tiny or crude, expand to accommodate kids’ fantasies and imagination. Children’s den-making, says Colin Ward in The Child in the City, carries over into adulthood. “Behind all our purposive activities, our domestic world, is this ideal landscape we acquired in childhood.” I still carve out sanctuaries to escape dishes and laundry and, nowadays, the invasion of email.

In my 1920s themed sitting room, the smallest room in our house, I sit on the floor surrounded by vintage children’s books, old perfume bottles, and McCoy violet pots filled with colored pencils. I write notes using my grandfather’s cedar chest as a desk, read, or work on art projects. Each evening, I wind down in this cozy room and let the day waft out the window.

Where do today’s children craft their private spaces? I never see kids in my neighborhood building forts or playhouses or even sitting under a tree. As Elizabeth Goodenough says in her book, Secret Spaces of Childhood, “Without a corner to build a world apart, [children] can’t plant what [author] Diane Ackerman calls ‘the small crop of self.’”

Many kids escape adults in their bedrooms, holed up with laptops or Play Stations. Apps and games let children create marvelous kingdoms. A house made of sticks can hardly compete with, say, the sophistication of Fortnite’s “Loot Lake.” Yet a space of the child’s own making provides solitude and expands to accommodate fantasies and imagination. Secret places in games are bounded by adult-created rules, the product of someone else’s imagination. Those seemingly limitless options are contained in a box.

How will children find their place in the world in front of screens? Hands tapping plastic keys can’t feel the fiber toughness of honeysuckle vines or the rough surface of a sun-warmed tarp. Eyes focusing on flickering avatars can’t track the up-and-down flight of a bluebird. The player’s sense of identity, disguised in a “skin,” is merely a reflection in the glass.

Better to seed that small crop of self with books which give a child ideas, words that flourish into mental pictures, and send her out the door to build her own private kingdoms.

Some Illustrator!

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In my next life, I’m coming back either as a cat living in our house (think Canyon Ranch for cats), or Melissa Sweet. I’ve followed her career since she illustrated James Howe’s Pinky and Rex (1990). I love this book for its atypical characters (Pinky is a boy who loves pink and stuffed animals, and Rex, his girl friend, is into dinosaurs), but also for Melissa’s fresh-faced characters and bright watercolors.

Then I heard her speak at a conference in 2005 about illustrating The Boy Who Drew Birds by Jacqueline Davis. I was enchanted by the collaged snippets—maps, music notes, handwriting—among her watercolor illustrations. One double-spread showcases a dried frog, a nest with eggshells, a dried lizard, lichen, a tiny skull. An insatiable collector, she used what was in her studio.

I too am a collector. I have at least 20 vintage suitcases filled with old magazines, photos, office supplies, scrapbooks, bought because people dump greeting cards, photograph albums, report cards and I have this pathetic need to rescue unwanted family memorabilia.

Candice Ransom’s mixed media collage

I was moving away from scrapbooking to making—well, weird stuff. Seeing Melissa’s work, I realized I was creating mixed-media collages with heritage photographs (I never scrapped regular photos, like trips to Disney World, because I never went anywhere). Melissa uses collage to “say what I need to say.”

Each book got better: A Splash of Red: The Life and Art of Horace Pippin, A River of Words: The Story of William Carlos Williams (both written by Jen Bryant), Firefly July: A Year of Very Short Poems (written by Paul B. Janeczko). Then Melissa wrote and illustrated Balloons Over Broadway, about Tony Sarg, puppeteer and creator of the Macy’s parade balloons. She made toys and puppets to understand what it “felt like to be in Sarg’s world.” I pored over the art, realizing how committed Melissa was to the research and her illustrations. She takes no shortcuts.

In The Right Word, she stepped up her game. The assemblages in the final double-spread caused my head to explode. And then … Some Writer! The Story of E.B. White, a mash-up of older kids’ nonfiction, picture book, and scrapbook. After I came to from swooning, I carried it around and made people look at it. Much of the art is contained in shadow boxes, like those of Joseph Cornell. If I had to choose a favorite, it would be the scene of Wilbur at the fair.

Being a Melissa Sweet fan, I’ve learned it’s possible to combine research, art, words, and found things into a project. A few years ago, I began making scrapbooks for my novels, a sort of illustrated outline. From magazine clip files, I choose images that represent a character or scene. By not trying to match an image to what’s in my head, I keep the story mine. I add bits of dialog and description. If the story changes, that’s okay. I just keep moving forward in both the scrapbook and the writing.

The book I’m working on now is complex in setting, characters, and plot. I’ve started a new scrapbook, but the vintage and modern magazine images don’t seem to be enough. It needs real art. I’m not an artist, but I decided to include a drawn animal character, sort of the way Melissa Sweet combines watercolor paintings and collage. Draw like she does! But her art is deceptive. I gnawed my fingernails studying the expressive slant of the dog’s ears in Tupelo Rides the Rails. It looks easy—it’s not.

Illustrator Trina Schart Hyman once wrote about trying to copy the style of Tomie dePaola. In ten minutes, she figured, she’d whip up a “Tomie” drawing. “Six hours later sweaty, frustrated, and thoroughly puzzled, I tore up the thirty-eighth ruined piece of paper in despair,” she admitted. His folksy style and childlike color was more sophisticated than she realized. If an accomplished artist like Trina Hyman couldn’t imitate Tomie dePaola, there was no hope for me to draw a Melissa Sweet-type cat. One pen line on my finished scrapbook page, and it would be ruined.

Paging through The Sleepy Little Alphabet by Judy Sierra, I noticed Melissa Sweet’s clouds. They appear to be penciled on graph and loose-leaf paper, cut out, and pasted on watercolor skies. I could draw cats on notebook paper, snip out one that isn’t too awful, and paste it in my scrapbook! Using unimportant paper makes the drawing seem less precious and should lessen my anxiety.

In her author’s note for Balloons Over Broadway, Melissa stresses she tried to convey the sense that her subject was having fun. “[Sarg’s] legacy reminds me that ‘play’ may be the most important element in making art!” A sense of play is a hallmark of Melissa Sweet’s work. A lesson for all of us who make children’s books!

Pumpkins into Coaches

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In 1961, when I was nine, I fell under the spell of a crumbling stone tower. It stood on the weed-choked property of the Portner Manor in Manassas, Virginia, catty-corner from my cousin’s house. As a devotee of Trixie Belden books, I craved mysteries the way other kids longed for ponies. Here was a mystery within spitting distance!

My cousin and I talked about the “Civil War look-out” tower until we finally had to climb it. Fighting briars, we thrashed our way to its base. Ivy cloaked the three-story red sandstone structure topped with gap-toothed battlements. Up close we noticed portholes and arrow slits. Some of the spiral steps outside the tower had caved in. We straddled the gaping hole, half-expecting a bony hand to grab our ankles, and crawled to the top.

The two upper floors had collapsed, but the round walls were intact, covered with creamy wallpaper and faded squares where pictures had once hung. We crept back down the steps and peered into the hole, certain a tunnel connected the tower to the estate gatehouse. Then we flailed through the brambles as if chased by Portner’s ghost. Back at my cousin’s, we threw ourselves on the ground, sweaty and victorious.

The “Civil War” tower really dated to 1882 when the mansion was built. But even if we’d known that fact as kids, we wouldn’t have cared. Manassas was steeped in history, but we traipsed through the decades, mixing rockets and cannons with gossip and make-believe in our daily play. We heard our grandfather, who’d been an undertaker long before we were born, say cryptically that during the Depression “people were too poor to die,” and wondered what happened to those people. Everything was a mystery.

In An American Childhood, Annie Dillard wrote, “We children lived and breathed our [city’s] history … We knew bits of this story, and we knew none of it.” My cousins and I knew bits of our town’s story and yet none of it. Geography was a tool to suit our purposes. We raced around the nearby battlefield, dodging monuments, our games shaped more by our imaginations than what had actually happened there.

In the field between the lumber yard and my cousin’s house, we turned over stones, hoping to find arrowheads or cement-colored minieˊ balls. We chased milkweed fairies to make modest wishes and, once, marveled at a clutch of speckled killdeer eggs resting in a pebble nest. Our sneakers pressed into the past, kicked up the red dust of the present, and pointed toward the future. We walked, as Dillard said, “oblivious through littered layers” of history, trespassing, running across other people’s yards. We owned that town.

Now I live in Fredericksburg, Virginia, a town even richer in history. I step across the same cobblestones where Washington and Jefferson once walked. Five major battles ripped through here during the Civil War. I wouldn’t expect kids today to wonder about Jefferson or Chancellorsville as they drive down Route 3. But I don’t see their sneakers touch the ground much, either, except during soccer and softball games.

Where are their mysteries? Do they weave Walmart and Dollar General into their free play? Movies and TV bombard kids with enough toys, costumes, and spin-offs to fuel “imaginative” play into the next millennium. Why would they scrounge for arrowheads when they have the latest Happy Meal toy to keep them entertained for five seconds? Or the thrill of a flashy new app on their screens? What do they own?

“Know you what it is to be a child?” Frances Thompson wrote in 1909. “It is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything.”

Portner Manor was turned into a nursing home in the late 60s. After standing 86 years, the “look-out” tower was torn down in 1978. The nursing home moved to better facilities, and the mansion fell to neglect. It’s for sale now, possibly headed for the wrecking ball.

When I recall that twilight climb all these years later, I’m not sure if I really saw the creamy wallpaper, or made it up in heightened anticipation, or dreamed it. But I can still see dusty pink cabbage roses in my mind’s eye (though I question wallpapering the inside of a round stone tower).

Mostly I remember the smooth sandstone steps beneath my sneakers, the sun-warmed walls against my palms, the delicious floaty feeling in my stomach, and those lofty summers when we turned nothing into everything.

Unexpected Wonder

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Last September, we drove to an empty lake deep in the Appalachians for a short vacation, a much-needed chance to relax. I longed to escape writing and house chores and cats and reconnect with nature.

When we arrived, clouds draped over the peaks and our room was gloomy. I missed civilization instantly and forced my husband to drive the seven crooked miles back down the mountain to the nearest hamlet so I could hit the Dollar store (the biggest concern). I raced through the aisles grabbing snacks, notebooks, pens, and word-search puzzle books. We’d come to unwind, but I’d dragged my Restless Self with us.

I chose this spot not just for its seclusion but also because of the lake’s mystery. Every 50 or 100 years, Mountain Lake performs a disappearing act. Scientists believe it drains itself and, when conditions are right, fills again by springs beneath the lake bed. Yet after years of tests, they still aren’t sure. Well, I wanted to know for sure. In addition to Restless Self, I also brought along Nosy-Got-To-Learn-More-Right-Now Self (yes, the car was crowded). Why did the lake empty? I grilled the poor guy running the gift shop. When was it coming back?

Like many of us, I look up stuff before I’ve finished thinking of it. Lack of a smartphone doesn’t slow me down—I run upstairs to my computer so fast I could medal in track. But the satisfaction of ferreting a fact in seconds doesn’t last and sometimes flat-out ruins the wonder of not knowing.

On the edge of sleep that night, I realized why I’d picked such a remote place: a children’s book, of course. Gone-Away Lake (1957) by Elizabeth Enright was one of my favorite books, along with its sequel Return to Gone-Away (1961). A community of summer houses were built around a lake in the late 1800s. The lake dried up in 1905 and the houses were abandoned. Present-day kids (well, in the ’50s) discover the “ship-wrecked” houses and two elderly people living there. These aren’t slam-bang, cliff-hanger stories, but a rich, luscious summer idyll with just enough mystery and the most gorgeous writing in children’s literature.

Each day, rain or shine, is packed with wonder at Gone-Away Lake. Brimming with curiosity, the kids discover plants, animals, insects that changed the landscape after the lake vanished. They listen to stories about the good old days when the community was in full swing. They pick out a not-too-falling-down house and make it their own.

When I woke up our first morning at Mountain Lake, the sun was bright. I left Restless and Nosy to the word-search puzzles and went exploring. I waded into the 55-acre site, marveling at the variety of plants and tiny critters that had adapted within the last five years. I paused by dry-docked rocks with strange formations. Overhead, the sky was paint box blue and I felt content. I didn’t need to identify that slug, or those purple flowers, or the snake that whipped nearly across my shoes. It was enough to let unexpected wonder wash over me.

Suddenly I didn’t want to go home. I wanted to explore every inch of that dried-up lake and wander the back roads that crisscrossed the mountain. I wanted to give myself over to wonder.

In Gone-Away Lake, ten-year-old Portia weeds the garden with her Aunt Hilda.

“If you could just hold onto it,” said Portia, sitting back on the warm grass. “Summer starting to be. Everything just exactly right.”

“But if it were this way every day, all the time, we’d get too used to it,” said Aunt Hilda. “It’s because it doesn’t and can’t last that a day like this is so wonderful.”

“Good things must have comparers, I suppose,” said Portia. “Or how would we know how good they are?”

Those few, perfect days at Mountain Lake became my comparer. I didn’t find a vacant colony of Victorian houses, but I gathered odd pebbles from the bottom of the lake bed, possibly created millions of years ago. I took some photos. I did not take notes.

Back home, I fell into my busy routine. Yet I made sure I checked the morning sky when I fetched the paper, watched starlings at stoplights, lingered at the door to catch a rare southeast breeze. I quit looking up every single question that flashed through my mind. Some things should remain a mystery.

Behind the Sign

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I came down with the flu. After weeks of dragging myself to the computer, I finally listened to the doctor and let myself be sick. One afternoon I pulled out my old journals. I haven’t kept a journal in the last few years, instead a planner dictates my days. My composition notebooks are a mishmash of thoughts, memories, observations, scribblings on books in progress, and notes from writer’s conferences. I’ve never been a dedicated diary keeper, but carrying around a handmade journal felt less like “being a writer” and more like staying in touch with the world.

Back then, I didn’t frequent Starbucks or museums or university libraries. My observations were made in diners where the first course for the special is cole slaw with Saltines, in general stores that carry weekly newspapers reporting a man was shot and became dead, and along back roads where people live in abandoned gas stations. I captured scenes like this:

In Goodwill today, a mother and daughter came in talking sixty to the minute. Naturally I eavesdropped. Mother: Look, they got Dale Earnhart glasses. Daughter: No, I seen ‘em before. I remembered shopping trips with my mother and sister, how we’d “find” stuff for each other.

The daughter was ahead of me in the check-out line. One of her items, a NASCAR throw, wasn’t priced. Her mother—a large woman in an ill-fitting dress—squeezed past me to stand behind her daughter. “Pardon me, sweetie,” she said. The clerk allowed the NASCAR throw was $14.99. Too much, the daughter said and paid for her other things.

Her mother set down two glasses, the Dale Earnhart ones. She pulled two dollars folded into tiny squares from her wallet. I wondered if she purchased the Earnhart glasses for her daughter, knowing she wanted them but didn’t have enough money. She thanked me again for letting her cut in front. The women talked all the way out the door. I wondered where they were headed next. I longed to go with them.

I know families like that. They’re everywhere, but most of us living our busy, forward-focused lives don’t notice the margin-dwellers. I see them because I once existed on the periphery. Deep inside, I still do. People at the ragged edge will give you their time and anything else, even if they can’t spare it. When they speak, in what Anne Tyler calls “pure metaphor,” I come home.

Reading my journals made me wonder where I’ve been lately and why my recent work feels so … safe. I was once on track to tell the stories of kids who have fallen through the cracks. Not in a poor-me-we-live-in-a-trailer-and-Daddy-chews-Red-Man way, but with dignity and even humor. After several failed attempts, I quit because I knew the stories I wanted to write would hardly be a top pick in an editor’s inbox.

Oct. 3, 2014: Some days—weeks—it feels as if I haven’t written a word. Not my words. I’m reminded how much I want to say, how little time I have to do it.

So I stopped keeping a journal. Stopped driving down back roads to get lost on purpose. Worse, I faced forward and ignored the edges where the lovely, important things are.

I found advice from Jack Gantos’s opening speech at the 2014 SCBWI Mid-winter conference. The slide on the screen showed the cover of his Newbery award-winner, Dead End in Norvelt, with the title written on a road sign and a boy standing behind it.

Feb. 22: “Always go behind the sign,” Gantos said. “It’s where the real stories are.” I already do that.

When I finished reading, I stacked the notebooks, reluctant to put them back on the dusty shelf. If I did, I’d bury a treasure trove of stories, sketches, places, names, scenes, and rare glimpses of my own true self. I moved them to the bedroom to dip into, hoping my dreams will urge me to record once more the soft cadence of forgotten voices.

I’m the only one standing in the way. No one will beg me to tell the stories I’ve already shot and declared dead without writing a syllable, hearing an editor say, No, I have seen this before. It’s up to me to find the edges, to unfold the tiny, tight squares of my confidence. To get lost on purpose and slip behind the sign. To see what I’m really part of.

Poetry from Stones

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[photo credit: Candice Ransom]

Outside my window right now: bare trees, gray sky, a brown bird. No, let’s try again. Outside my window, the leafless sweetgum shows a condo of squirrels’ nests, a dark blue rim on the horizon indicates wind moving in, and a white-crowned sparrow scritches under the feeders. Better. Even in winter, especially in winter, we need to wake up our lazy brains, reach for names that might be hibernating.

[photo credit: Candice Ransom]

In November, I taught writing workshops at a school in a largely rural county. I was shocked to discover most students couldn’t name objects in their bedrooms, much less the surrounding countryside. Without specific details, writing is lifeless. More important, if children can’t call up words, can’t distinguish between things, they will remain locked in wintry indifference. Some blame falls on us.

A recent edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary swapped nature words for modern terms. Out went acorn, wren, dandelion, nectar, and otter. In went blog, bullet-point, attachment, chatroom, and voicemail. Updating dictionaries isn’t new. And maybe cygnet isn’t as relevant as database, but it’s certainly more musical. If we treat language like paper towels, it’s no wonder many kids can’t name common backyard birds.

When I was nine, my stepfather taught me the names of the trees in our woods, particularly the oaks. I learned to identify red, white, black, pin, post, and chestnut oaks by their bark, leaves, and acorns. Labeling trees, birds, and wildflowers didn’t give me a sense of ownership. Instead, I felt connected to the planet. I longed to know the names of rocks, but they kept quiet.

That same year we fourth graders were issued Thorndyke-Barnhart’s Junior Dictionary. I fell on mine like a duck on a June bug, enchanted by new words. My parlor trick was spelling antidisestablishmentarianism, the longest word in the dictionary. Kids can Google the longest word in the English language, but the experience isn’t the same as browsing through a big book of words.

Emerson wrote, “… the poet is the Namer, or Language-maker … The poets made all the words, naming things after their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name and not another’s.” I believe young children are poets, assigning names and making up words to mark new discoveries. After they become tethered to technology, they parrot words from commercials, programs, and video games. That fresh language is lost.

So imagine my delight when I found a new book for children, The Lost Words: A Spell Book. British nature-writer Robert MacFarlane paired with artist Jackie Morris to rescue 20 of the words snipped from the Oxford Junior Dictionary. Words like newt and kingfisher are showcased as “spells,” rather than straight definitions. MacFarlane’s spells let the essence of the creature sink deep, while Morris’s watercolors create their own magic.

On their joint book tour throughout England, MacFarlane and Morris introduced children to words—and animals. On her blog Morris writes: “I was about to read the wren spell to a class of 32 six-year-olds when the booksellers stopped me. ‘Ask the children if they know what a wren is, first, Jackie.’ I did. Not one child knew that a wren is a bird. So they had never seen a wren, nor heard that sharp bright song. But now they know the name of it, the shape of it, so perhaps if one flits into sight they will see it, hear it, know it.”

The Lost Words makes me want to take children by the hand and tell them the names of the trees and birds and clouds that illustrate our winter landscape. By giving kids specific names, they can then spin a thread from themselves to the planet.

Ammonite [photo credit: Candice Ransom]

“Language is fossil poetry,” Emerson continues in his essay, “as the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.”

Rock rasps, what are you?
I am Raven! Of the blue-black jacket and the boxer’s swagger,
Stronger and older than peak and than boulder, raps Raven in reply.

From The Lost Words

Let’s dig up lost words before they become buried beneath the rubble of STEM-worthy terms. Feel the shape of them, polish their shells, let them shine.

True Story

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Recently I attended a writer’s conference mainly to hear one speaker. His award-winning books remind me that the very best writing is found in children’s literature. When he delivered the keynote, I jotted down bits of his sparkling wisdom.

At one point he said that we live in a broken world, but one that’s also filled with beauty. My pen slowed. Something about those words bothered me. The crux of his speech was that as writers for children, we are tasked to be honest and not withhold the truth.

After the applause pattered away, the air in the ballroom seemed charged. Everyone was eager to march, unfurling the banner of truth for young readers! If we had been given paper, we would have started brilliant, authentic novels on the spot.

The keynote’s message carried over into break-out sessions. Panelists admitted to craving the truth when they were kids, things parents wouldn’t tell them. Participants agreed. We should show kids the world as it really is! The implication being that children leading “normal” lives should be aware of harsher realities and develop empathy. Kids living outside the pale would find themselves, maybe learn how to cope with their situations.

I stopped taking notes.

Here’s my truth: I was born into a broken world. By age four, I’d experienced scores of harsher realities. At seven, I learned the hardest truth of all: that parents aren’t required to want or love their children. I spent most of my childhood fielding one real-world challenge after the other. I did not want to read about them, though few books fifty years ago explored issues of alcoholism, homelessness, and domestic violence.

Christmas Day when I was 11 with my sister and my cousins. I was already a writer at this age.

I read to escape, delving into stories where the character’s biggest challenge was finding grandmother’s hidden jewels, as in The Secret of the Stone Griffins. Fluff? So what? In order to set the bar, I had to seek normal and didn’t care if Dick-and-Jane families weren’t real. Even Mo, the alien girl in Henry Winterfield’s Star Girl who’d tumbled from her spaceship, lived a normal life with her family on Asra, climbing trees on that faraway planet like I did on Earth.

In a family of non-readers, I broke free of the norm. Not only did I read constantly, but decided to be a writer at an early age. I’d write the kind of books I loved, books where secrets involved buried treasure, not things I had to keep quiet about; books where kids felt protected enough to embark on adventures.

My mother and stepfather regarded me with odd respect, as if unsure what planet this kid had come from. So long as “story-writing” didn’t interfere with schoolwork (it did), my mother excused me from chores. Only once did she declare reading material inappropriate.

I was nine and fresh out of library books. I found a True Story magazine and was deep into story about an abused boy when my mother caught me. She thought I was learning about sex. I was outraged by the injustice: punished for reading about a kid my age! Now I think about the irony.

Then I grew up and wrote children’s books. Most of my fiction was light and humorous. Yet some brave writers tackled serious subjects. My colleague Brenda Seabrooke wrote a slender, elegant verse novel called Judy Scuppernong. This coming-of-age story touches on family secrets and alcoholism. The format was perfect for navigating difficult subjects.

I sat down and wrote a poem called “Nobody’s Child.” More followed, until I’d told my own story. My agent submitted my book Nobody’s Child. One editor asked me to rewrite it as a YA novel. “You’ve already done the hard part,” he said. He was wrong. Each time I revised (many times over the years), I had to crawl back into that dark place. Some people said that by telling my story, I’d be able to put it behind me. They were wrong. I never will.

The truth is, I wrote Nobody’s Child to find answers. I already knew the what and the how. I wanted to know why. But by then everyone involved was gone, taking their reasons with them. If I were to fictionalize my story to help another child in the same situation, I couldn’t make the ending turn out any better.

In the fantasies and mysteries and books about animals I read as a kid, I figured out I’d probably be okay. When I looked up from whatever library book I was reading, or whatever story I was writing, I noticed the real world around me. Not all of it was broken. There were woods and gardens and cats and birds and, yes, at last, people who cared about me.

Author Peter Altenberg said, “I never expected to hold the great mirror of truth up before the world; I dreamed only of being a little pocket mirror …one that reflects small blemishes, and some great beauties, when held close enough to the heart.”

Valiant children’s writers will flash the great mirror of truth in bolder works than mine. I’m content to shine my little pocket mirror at small truths, no bigger than a starling’s sharp eye, from my heart to my reader’s.

The Sameness of Sheep

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Once, when I discussed my work-in-progress, middle-grade novel with my agent, I told her the character was eleven. “Make her twelve,” she said. “But eleven-year-olds aren’t the same as twelve-year-olds,” I protested. “Those are different ages.” “Make her twelve,” she insisted. “The editor will ask you to change it anyway.”

I didn’t finish the book (don’t have that agent anymore, either). The age argument took the wind out of my sails. I understood the reasoning—create older characters to get the most bang for the middle-grade buck by snaring younger readers. Better yet, stick the character in middle school.

The true middle-grade novel is for readers eight to twelve with some overlap. Chapter books for seven- to ten-year-olds bisect the lower end of middle grade. “Tween” books, aimed at twelve- to fourteen-year-olds, straddle the gap between MG and YA. If my characters are twelve, I hit the middle grade and tween target and everybody wins. Maybe not.

At our public library, I pulled more than a dozen new MG novels off the shelves. Opened each book, checked the age of the main character. Twelve. Twelve. Eleven! No, wait, turning twelve in the next chapter. While the characters and stories were all different, there was a sheeplike sameness reading about twelve-year-olds.

It worries me. Publishers contribute to pushing elementary school children as quickly as possible into middle school. Where are the middle-grade books about a ten-year-old character? An eight-year-old character? Ah, now we’ve backed into chapter book territory.

Supposedly, kids prefer to “read up” in age. This assumes that, say, fifth graders want to know what to expect when they’re in eighth grade. (Lord help them.) Reading about a character who is two or three years older might generate anxiety in some readers. And they may disdain shorter, simpler chapter books.

In the past, before publisher and bookstore classifications, age wasn’t much of an issue. Wilbur is the main character in Charlotte’s Web, although the book opens with Fern saving him. Fern is eight, a fact mentioned on the first page. Does anyone care what grade Fern is in once he lands in Zuckerman’s richly-depicted barnyard?

More recently, Kevin Henkes broke the “age” barrier with his terrific middle grade novel, The Year of Billy Miller (2013). Fuse 8’s Betsy Bird compared it to Beverly Cleary’s Ramona books. Billy is seven and starting second grade, a character normally found in a briskly-written, lower-end chapter book. Yet Billy Miller clocks in at a grand 240 pages. Bird praises Henkes, “[He] could have … upped his hero’s age to nine or ten or even eleven. He didn’t. He made Billy a second grader because that’s what Billy is. His mind is that of a second grader … To falsely age him would be to make a huge mistake.”

Author G. Neri took on a bigger challenge. In Tru & Nelle (2016), the characters are seven and six. This hefty MG explores the childhood friendship between Truman Capote and Harper Lee. Neri chose fiction rather than biography because, as he states in his author’s note, “[This] story was born from real life.” He didn’t shy away from writing a lengthy, layered book about a first and second grader.

We need more books featuring eight‑, nine‑, ten-year-old characters that are true middle grade novels and not chapter books. Children grow up too fast. Let them linger in the “middle” stage, find themselves in books with characters their own age.

Let them enjoy the cycle of seasons, “the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep.” Soon enough, they’ll race away from the barnyard and into middle school.

The Book Box

Big Green Pocketbook 1

For a fiction workshop, I asked participants to bring in childhood books that influenced them to become a writer. Naturally, I did the assignment myself. Choosing the books was easy, but they felt insubstantial in my hands, vintage hardbacks that lacked the heft of, say, the last Harry Potter. When it came my turn to talk, I figured I’d stammer excuses for their shabby, old-fashioned, stamped jackets. (“Well, this is the way library books looked in the fifties.”)

I wanted to tuck my beloved books in a box to keep them safe, like baby robins fallen out of a nest. Really, what is a book, but ideas, adventures, people, and places protected by cardboard, shaped like a box? I carried this notion with me on a trip to Michael’s, where I found a sturdy box with a jigsaw of little boxes stacked under the front flap. I knew just what I’d do with this prize: showcase my favorite books in an assemblage.

At FedEx Office, I color photocopied the book covers, reduced them several sizes, then dashed through A.C. Moore’s miniature section to collect tiny endowed objects. Next, I happily sorted through my scrapbook and ephemera stash for just-right window dressing. I glued on paper, adding the objects. Pictures and trinkets were pretty, but not enough. The box needed words to set the stories—and their meaning—free.

I typed quotes and notes into strips folded accordion-style. Margaret Wise Brown’s Home for a Bunny gently reminded me that once I had lived “under a rock, under a stone.” Like the bunny, I had no home of my own until I was five. This was my first book, my first experience in identifying with a character.

The title of Trixie Belden and the Secret of the Mansion contained “secret” and “mansion,” words that made my heart thump. Trixie lived in the country like me, and had to work in the garden, like I did. Trixie stumbled into mysteries and I did, too, when I furiously scribbled whodunnits in fourth grade. Just like that, I became a writer.

The Diamond in the Window opens with a quote from Emerson: “On him the light of star and moon / Shall fall with purer radiance down … / Him Nature giveth for defense / His formidable innocence; / The mounting up, the shells, the sea, / All spheres, all stones, his helpers be …” At eleven, I skipped those words, but I didn’t ignore the small lessons from Emerson and Thoreau sprinkled throughout this fantasy / adventure / family / mystery story. This book changed my life.

I had to be married on Valentine’s Day, after the “Bride of Snow” chapter (and I was one, too, in three feet of snow!). Our powder room has a Henry Thoreau theme and we have a gazing globe (“The crystal sphere of thought”) in our back yard, like the Hall family.

With some thought and imagination, a book box can be a tangible book report. Supplies required: a cigar box, construction paper, glue, and a favorite book. A box covered in red construction paper could represent Wilbur’s barn. A lid could replicate the map of Hundred Acre Wood. Or Mr. Lemoncello’s library.

Making my book box helped me slow down and think about what my favorite books meant to me. How Diamond in the Window led me to the works of Thoreau and Emerson, inspired me to look up from the printed page and truly see the great sphere of our world.

I still fill my pockets with rocks, pick up shells at the beach, and stare at the stars. I wonder if the rocks were broken off from ancient glaciers, and what happened to the sea creatures inside the shells. The shells and rocks stay in jars and boxes. The stars cannot be contained, thankfully.

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