Welcoming Home the Prodigal Heart

 What keeps my writer's heart going?

Here is what I almost wrote:

Nothing keeps my writer's heart going. My writer's heart flatlined last March, the day the CDC announced that I was officially elderly and at risk.  Before last March, I thought of myself as a ten-year-old heart in a body of indeterminate age. Overnight, I became an old person who could die. My ten-year-old writer's heart curled up in a closet somewhere. Except for blog posts, I've written almost nothing since this time last year. 

Me, Carmela and April at a long ago conference

All the things that normally keep my "kid's heart" going...are gone. Young Writer's Camp. Didn't happen last summer, haven't heard about this year. Writer's group and conferences?  Gone or gone virtual. (I have difficulty hearing on Zoom.) Eavesdropping on random people. There are no random people because I don't leave the house unless it's a dire emergency. Talking to friends, over a glass of wine, meandering from subject to subject. (I mentioned my problems with Zoom, right?)

The world was so hateful and judgmental and scary...writing was the last thing I wanted to do. Not writing was the scariest thing of all, because writing is how I make sense of life. Now, the more I journaled, the less sense anything made.  Words not only failed me...I couldn't find words. I was using a thesaurus just to have a conversation with my husband. I couldn't remember why I ever thought I could write.

Maybe I couldn't write any more. 

Then something happened.

Yesterday morning, I started out on dire emergency errands...picking up prescriptions from various pharmacies. I left the house in cords and a flannel shirt. By the time I got home, the temperature was in the 70's and I was hot. So I changed into shorts and a t-shirt, and took my dog for a walk.

I wear shorts around the house in winter, because my husband insists on keeping the thermostat set to "The Tropics in July."  I walk my dog several times a day. Neither of these things are unusual. However, for the first time in months and months...I walked the dog while wearing shorts. A warm breeze tickled my knees. Boing! In an instant, I was ten years old again, wearing shorts after a winter of wool tights and storm boots. Free of slogging through slush and toe-freezing winds, I was barelegged and skipping along in my new Keds. (OK, yesterday I was wearing Vans.)

Mom and I brave another Chicago winter

My cousins and I (I'm the one shorts.)

My child's heart had returned. My inner ten-year-old is who writes my stories. Life was fascinating when I was ten, full of possibility and  hope, both sadly lacking this past year. Kids are all about hope. That's why I write for them and not their parents.

My family has been spared sickness this year, and for that I am truly thankful. But COVID and all the accompanying chaos did a number on my heart and soul. I thought my ten-year-old heart had packed her bags and hit the road, never to be seen again. 

My writer's heart has come out from wherever she was hiding, ready to hope again. And write. However, she needs time to recover. She might blow bubbles on the back porch.  Or dance around the den to her old Monkees albums.  She will most definitely re-read her favorite childhood books. And of course, dog walks in shorts and Keds. 

Some day, in-person writing conferences and long talks over wine will return. I've had vaccine shot number one, with number two scheduled for St. Patrick's Day. Until it's safe for me to re-enter the world, there is time to re-read the two best books ever written--Charlotte's Web and Harriet the Spy.  E.B. White and Louise Fitzhugh certainly knew how to keep their child hearts beating.

Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

Thank You, Mr. E.B. White :3 Weeks of Thankfulness

      I was a frustrated three-year-old who wanted to read. The world was full of words and I had to know what they meant. I taught myself to by asking the closest adult (usually my mother)t o read me the words on the TV screen, the OTC remedy bottles on the toilet tank, the signs on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Equipped with a vocabulary that included restaurant, constipation, and the most beautiful word in the English language, chocolate...I became a compulsive reader.

 

A little breakfast literature with Quick Draw McGraw.

I read everything. Cereal boxes. The contents of the mailbox; National Geographic, Look, Life. The Sears & Roebuck Catalog. Little Golden Books at the supermarket check out. (I could get through at least one by the time the groceries were bagged.)

   An indiscriminate reader, you might say.

   I read for information. In kindergarten, my favorite book was Facts about the Presidents and Their Wives.  I can still recall endless, useless facts from this book.  Example:  Martin Van Buren's wife was named Hannah, and died before he took office.  James Buchanan's niece, Harriet Lane, served as the official White House hostess for our only bachelor president.  Calvin Coolidge's youngest son, Calvin Jr died at 16, from blood poisoning after playing tennis without socks, and developed an infected heel blister. (That scared me away from sockless tennis shoes for years.)

    I loved reading more than anything, but I hadn't yet found magic in words.  I read books the way I ate Fritos...one after another until someone told me to stop. Lots of Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drews, an occasional Hardy Boys, but beyond them, I cannot recall a single title that made an impression on me.

    Until Christmas, third grade.

   Each Christmas, my dad scoured his favorite second-hand bookstore for a good, hardcover book for me. (Hardcover books! More precious than gold!) The year I was eight, Dad gave me The Book. The one that showed me words could be woven not only into stories, but could send you to an alternate universe. Words burnished into characters who made you laugh, cry or ponder months after you'd read the last chapter.

   The book was E.B. White's Charlotte's Web. 

E.B. White (photo by Jill Krementz)

   It was not love at first sight. Garth Williams' cover art made it clear this was a book about animals. After reading Old Yeller, I figured out that whatever the book, if there was an animal character, it would die. I couldn't stand dying dogs and deer caught in forest fires. My dad's childhood favorite, Toby Tyler, left me with a lifelong dislike of both chimpanzees and circuses. Don't even get me started on Black Beauty.

    I opened the book and read, "'Where is Papa going with that ax?' said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast."

   Who could put down a book with a first sentence like that? Before I knew it, Fern had saved a runt pig, named him Wilbur and eventually took him to his new home at her Uncle Homer Zuckerman's farm.  Poor Wilbur was lonely without Fern.  I knew how that felt. I was always the new kid at school. Would Wilbur make new friends? I was well into the story before I realized Wilbur talked, and so did his barn mates--sheep, geese, and a rat named Templeton. By the time I met Charlotte the spider, I was totally hooked.

    That sneaky Mr. E.B. White made me like a book with talking animals. Animals as human as my own classmates. (In some cases, more human.)

Third grade me

     I loved snarky Templeton, the rat. He was sneaky, underhanded, manipulative and utterly hilarious. The line "'What do you think I am, anyway, a rat-of-all-work?'" still makes me giggle. There was the wise and gentle Charlotte, who was a spider, for crying out loud. I loathed spiders but Charlotte was my first lesson in "things are not always what they appear to be." I adored the innocent and gullible Wilbur. Plus a whole Greek chorus of lambs, horses and geese.

   For the first time, I noticed the way the author used language to create scenes as vivid as a movie. He lovingly listed just what pig slops are:"Middlings, warm water, apple parings, meat gravy, carrot scrapings, meat scraps, stale hominy and the wrapper off a package of cheese."  To show the enormity of the crowds that came to see Charlotte's web, White catalogued every kind of vehicle you might find in rural 1950's New England. "...Fords and Chevvies and Buick roadsters and GMC pickups and Plymouths and Studebakers and Packards and DeSotos with gyromatic transmissions and Oldsmobiles with rocket engines and Jeep station wagons and Pontiacs."

     Up until now, description, those long, long paragraphs, unbroken by dialog, were something I skipped. Not now. I might miss the details of Templeton's night of culinary debauchery at the State Fair.

   But Mr. E.B. White was not finished with me.  One grisly January day, I sat in an overheated, overcrowded allergist's office, waiting for my weekly allergy shots, Charlotte's Web in hand. Unlike my usual habit of tearing through books in a couple of hours, I had taken my time with Charlotte, savoring every character, description and turn of plot. I was at the most exciting part, where Wilbur, Charlotte and Templeton go to the State Fair. The sniveling, sneezing kids, stuffed into smelly nylon parkas, receded. I smelled the gamey sawdust of the Fair barns, heard the screams from the Midway rides, and best of all, Wilbur winning the blue ribbon. Could this get any better?

   No. Because in the next pages, Charlotte tells Wilbur and Templeton the plans for her death.

   What? I re-read the previous chapter to see if I had skipped a page, a paragraph, a sentence that would explain that Charlotte was kidding, or that her death was far in the future.

    I had forgotten the lessons of Old Yeller and Toby Tyler.  

    "Next day, as the Ferris wheel was being taken apart and the race horses were being loaded into vans...Charlotte died. The sheds and buildings were empty and forlorn. The infields was littered with bottles and trash. Nobody, of the hundreds of people that had visited the Fair, knew that a grey spider had played the most important part of all. No one was with her when she died.

     Mr. E.B. White had committed the ultimate sin.  He made me do something no other book had done before.  Not Old Yeller, not Toby Tyler.

     He made me love a character who died. He made me cry. In public, in front of strangers. In an allergist's office, for crying out loud! (which I was.)

     I had discovered that the best of writers, plump, prune and position each word just so. The result?, An imaginary world, more immediate and alive than "real life." That's the kind of writer I wanted to be.

     I'm still trying.

     Update: Jane H is the winner of our latest Book Giveaway, Toby by Hazel Mitchell.

     Don't forget to enter our latest giveaway, our latest book giveaway, for Bjorn's Gift by Sandy Brehl. Deadline is Nov 30, so get that entry in before you are distracted by Turkey Day.

Posted by Mary Ann Rodman
   
 

Reading as an Eater

Reading Mary Ann's last post reminded me of a wonderful handbook for young writers that I recently bought for a talented neighbor.  In it, Anne Mazer bravely confesses that she's never much cared for Charlotte's Web.  While I adored Charlotte's Web and probably read it a dozen times, I must admit that I have no memory whatsoever of the passage Mary Ann cited with such love and affection.  I am a foodie, and instead it was the buttermilk in the creases of Wilbur's ears and the scraps of Templeton's newspapers that made a lifelong impression on me.

Reading, as I always tell my students, is a highly subjective experience.

A Wrinkle in Time conjures for me images of cocoa; lettuce and tomato sandwiches; turkey and dressing.  Of course I also remember pulsating IT, the rhythm of the bouncing balls and jump ropes, the quirky language of the three Mrs. Ws. 

In short, I am not a visual thinker.  At all.  I don't care whether the heroine of my book has honey-colored hair or which brand of shoes she is wearing.  What grounds me in an alternate reality is the scent of freshly cut grass or the taste of a dark chocolate Reese's cup.  Yet how to describe these sensations?  Because many of us are visual thinkers, English, I would venture to say, has evolved to possess a dearth of descriptive words for scents, sounds, and, to a slightly lesser extent, tastes.

From Ramona Quimby, Age 8, by Beverly Cleary:

"Ramona bit into her hamburger.  Bliss.  Warm, soft, juicy, tart with relish.  Juice dribbled down her chin.  She noticed her mother start to say something and chnage her mind.  Ramona caught the dribble with her paper napkin before it reached her collar.  The French fries -- crip on the outside, mealy on the inside -- tasted better than anything Ramona had ever eaten."   

I never liked hamburgers as a kid until I read this passage.  I don't believe that Beverly Cleary is best known for her descriptive language, but I still think of this scene every time I eat a french fry.

Of course the brilliance of Beverly Cleary is typically recognized to be in her humor, and these are the other passages that have always stayed with me.  From the first page of Ramona the Pest:

"'I'm not acting like a pest.  I'm singing and skipping,' said Ramona, who had only recently learned to skip with both feet."

I have a five-year-old daughter, and Ramona IS my daughter.  Oh, when Ramona thought she had to sit still for "the present," when she described her eye color as "brown and white," when she understood the lyrics of the national anthem to involve a "dawnzer" that emitted a "lee light" -- what child could not empathize with these situations and laugh?  I am typing this paragraph and thinking, "I can't WAIT to read these books to my kids!"

So food and funny is what does it for me.  What an interesting exercise in self-analysis this has been!  As writers and readers, it is always a good idea to ask ourselves -- what are our touchstones?  And why?
--Jeanne Marie

P.S. Don't forget to enter our fabulous Patricia Reilly Giff two-book-set book giveaway!



  

Writing Is Like a Box of Chocolates

       My favorite book is Charlotte's Web.  I loved it as a third grader, and I love it today. I cannot think of another book that makes laugh, cry and think . . .  sometimes in one paragraph.   Any book that can do all that for me, over a period of . . . well, a lot of years . . . is my definition of a masterpiece.
       E.B. White's seamless writing is a delight to read . . . and hard to pull apart for examination.  One thing that struck me as a child, was his use of lists as description.  He does it in several places, particularly in describing the contents of Wilbur's slops.  My favorite "list"is this one, after Charlotte's first web message.

           The Zukerman's driveway was full of  cars and trucks from morning till night--Fords and Chevvies and Buick roadmasters and GMC pickups and Plymouths and Studebakers and Packards and DeSotos with gyromatic transmissions and Oldsmobiles with rocket engines and Jeep station wagons and Pontiacs. ---pg. 83-84.

      White could have ended the sentence at the word "night", and still had a perfectly serviceable sentence. But, no, he wanted to show the reader how many different kinds of people, through their various vehicles, came to see the wonder of the web.
      I am sure E.B. White never gave a thought as to whether he was writing a "timeless" story to be read sixty years later in a world without Studebakers, Packards and DeSotos. Even reading it for the first time in the early 1960's. those cars were as dead as the dodo for me. That small detail never bothered me. What struck me was White specificity in using those brand names.  Without knowing what it was called, I was introduced to the concept of specific writing.          
       While revising, I spend hours and hours picking over my word selection. Rather like Forrest Gump and his box of chocolates, ("you never know what you'll get") I never know how a specific noun, verb, adjective and occasionally, an adverb is going to feel in a sentence. I insert the word, and read the sentence out loud.  Often, a word that sounded just fine in my head, tastes like a lemon cream center when spoken.
         I hate lemon cream chocolates.
         Unlike, Forrest, who was perfectly content to let life surprise him, I punch holes in my words, looking for the one with the maple fudge center.
         I love maple fudge chocolates.
         The perfect word, that specific detail, will melt slowly and sweetly on my tongue, like my favorite candy. Looking for that one word--the one that can describe that moment, that emotion, that person--is the reason I write so slowly. I can select, "chew" and reject words for hours on end. As Mark Twain said "The difference between the right words and the wrong word, is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."
        When I have bitten into my nineteenth lemon cream, sometimes I use the listing method, writing down all the possibilities I can think of. Sometimes, I end up using the entire list, as White did.  More often, listing frees my mind to produce that one word.  For instance, in my picture book, Surprise Soup, I stalled out in the scene in which Kevie actually makes soup. I don't cook. Period. I couldn't list cooking techniques or tools. I could, however, list the sounds of cooking, since that is as close as I get to a kitchen.  Listing sounds -- splishety splash, chippety chop, scrubbety scrub-- got me back on track.
        In writing, finding that maple fudge chocolate is everything.

Writing Workout

       In her book Paper Lightning, Darcy Pattison uses the phrase "billions-and-billons to one-and-only-one" to explain specific writing to students. For example, "I caught a fish" is a dull sentence because there are billions-and-billions of fish. Pick a specific fish, maybe sharks. Still, there are lots and lots of species of shark (360, to be specific!). OK, how about a bull shark?  Having narrowed it down to a specific kind of shark, what is different about this particular shark? Maybe he had an evil look in his eye.So our new sentence would be "I caught a bull shark with an evil look in his eye."
      To get to that specificity, you can do a "list drill". Pick non-specific nouns that are common to your student's writing such as bike, dance, video game. Pick one, and give the students one minute to quickly write down all the possible specific types of bikes, dances or video games. (I always tell my students not to "think too hard....just write!") After each one minute drill, I encourage (never demand) that students share their descriptors. This can be done with nouns, verbs and adjectives (adverbs are a whole other topic!).  This trains the student to quickly think of alternatives in the revision process.

P.S. I apologize for the lateness of this post---today is the first day of school here in Atlanta. Utter mayhem!

---posted by Mary Ann Rodman
 

Living Inside the Story

     From the time I taught myself to read, I have been an obsessive reader. My mother used to joke that the first time she saw me without a book was at my wedding. (Little did she know that one of the things that worried me the most that day was knowing that I didn't have a "good book" to take on my honeymoon!)
    As a child, I was an undiscriminating reader. I read in the book aisle at E.J. Korvette's while my parents shopped. I borrowed books from friends, relatives, the neighbors. I read newspapers left in busses and cabs. Cereal boxes. Anything.
     Finding reading material when I was in elementary school was not that easy. Public libraries in the 'burbs were either non-existent or meagerly stocked. I never knew that schools were supposed to have libraries until I moved to Mississippi in the fifth grade. There was the school book club catalog, but once you'd ordered the five or six books you wanted to read, that was it for the year. A book store was an exotic destination, found only "downtown" in large cities.  I spent a good chunk of my day finding books to feed my habit. (Yes, this does sound like something from Intervention.)
     It was during those years, that I found the four books that formed me as a reader, a writer, and as a person. I didn't just read these books. I read them to shreds. I climbed inside them and lived there for weeks at a time. And when I finished the 515th reading of one of these books, I would read it again. And again. They have followed me to college, into marriage and motherhood, and are on my shelf today.
      Three of these titles are Charlotte's Web, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and The Diary of a Young Girl. The fourth was the first to show me how writing could transcend the printed page and become a part of my life. This was a religious experience for a fourth grader.
     Fourth grade stunk on ice as far as I was concerned.  I had managed to run afoul of my teacher the first week of school, and things grew progressively worse as the year wore on. My saving grace was the classroom copy of Depend on Katie John by Mary Calhoun. As an adult, I can see how the fourth grade me could identify with the tomboyish-always-in-a-jam Katie John.  What made the book memorable was that it made me laugh out loud.
     Unfortunately, this happened during arithmetic.  I was supposed to be listening to my teacher explain the intricacies of long division, not reading a book tucked under my open math text. This didn't happen once; it happened over and over until my teacher confiscated the book, for the rest of the year.
    I felt as if I had lost a friend. Not just a friend, but one who could always cheer me up and make me laugh. If fourth grade had been a long slog so far, without Katie John, it threatened to turn into a death march. Losing the book certainly didn't improve my attitude toward my teacher. My school day was already an eight-hour tightrope walk, trying not to tick off The Teacher. Without Katie John, I found it hard to keep my balance.
     Life took a turn for the better when my father gave me my own hardcover copy of Depend on Katie John for my tenth birthday. I didn't know that regular people could own hardcover books; I thought they were something special only for libraries and schools.
     "Don't take that book to school," my mother warned. She didn't have to worry. No way would I risk my precious book and friend falling into the clutches of The Evil-Math-Loving-Book-Hating Teacher. I really did depend on Katie John. That book was the flotation device that kept my head above water until the end of fourth grade.
    I had always loved books, but the power this book held for me was something magic. How did this Mary Calhoun person put those words together in a way that made me laugh every single time? Even though I had been writing for several years already, I began to wonder could I ever be that kind of writer? One who could make a kid laugh, could create a character more real to me than my best friend?
     I have spent my life so far, trying to live up to the challenge of Mary Calhoun and Katie John.
     And speaking of reading...
  
What I've Been Reading
Adult memoir: Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen; The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance by Elna Baker; Half-Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls (technically this is fiction, but it reads like a memoir)
Adult non-fiction: The Most They Ever Had by Rick Bragg
YA fiction: Almost Perfect by Brian Katcher; The Sister Wife by Shelley Hrdlitschka; The Sniper by James Riordan; Love is the Higher Law by David Levithan, Flash Burnout by L.K. Madigan. The Goodbye Season by Marion Hale; Liar by Justine Labalestier, Crossing Stones by Helen Frost; Death on the River by John Wilson; Going Bovine by Libba Bray
Graphic novel:  The Storm in the Barn by Matt Phelan
Middle grade non-fiction:  Marching for Freedom by Elizabeth Partridge; Eleanor, Quiet No More by Doreen Rappaport
Picture Book: You and Me and Home Sweet Home by George Ella Lyon; Subway Ride by Heather Lynne Miller; Crow Call by Lois Lowry