Whenever I think of the power of childhood memories, I am reminded of the MFA graduate lecture of author Sarah Sullivan while we were classmates at Vermont College.  Sarah guided us in an exercise that asked us to remember a place where as a child we felt safe, a place where we felt “cradled in security.”  She helped us through a series of guided questions to remember that place and suggested that in some ways we're always longing to go back.  We began by drawing the place, sketching in details as best we could remember.  Once immersed emotionally and visually in our “safe place”, we were asked to gradually ponder these questions: “What do you see?  What do you hear?  What do you smell?  Are there people around you?  Is there an animal nearby?  What is above you? (a ceiling? tree branches? the sky?)  What is below you?  (water? grass? a floor?)  What do you remember?”

“Without our memories, what are we?” asks Leonard Pitts in a recent column.  “We are the equation after the blackboard has been wiped, the sandcastle after the wave—smeared images and shapeless shapes melting into the sand.”  (Chicago Tribune, p. 18, 10/30/14)  He's referring to recent visits with a favorite aunt who's now living through the lens of Alzheimer’s.  Yet she still remembers.  Maybe not what happened ten minutes ago, but what happened fifty years ago.  She remembers how to sing “The Way You Do the Things You Do” with the Temptations and how to hug her nephew, and what it feels like to go to the movies.  Leonard Pitts’ fond remembrances of his aunt echo the emotional resonance of the novel The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean, a story that shows how the mundane present existence of an Alzheimer’s patient can’t hold a candle to her powerfully moving memories of life decades earlier when she helped rescue art treasures during the Nazi invasion of her hometown in Leningrad.  Without our memories, what are we?

Maybe the old adage, write what you know, would be better phrased, write what you remember, write what you feel.  Sarah Sullivan’s memory exercises are powerful methods to get at what matters most in a story, what Sarah calls “the emotional truth, the stirrings of a writer’s heart, the wood smoke rising between the lines.”

“I learned not to look away at the moment when I should be paying the most attention.  The closer I got to the heart of a scene, to the really difficult material to write, the emotionally challenging stuff or the exchange in which the conflict is made most explicit, the more I’d look for a way out of writing it.  This was out of fear, obviously, because you don’t want to run up against your limitations in craft, intelligence or heart.  It’s much easier to duck the really vital material, but it kills what you’re writing to do so, kills it instantly.”  Matthew Thomas, on writing his novel, We Are Not Ourselves, interview with John Williams, NY Times Book Review – Open Book, 9/7/14

“Soon, you’ll grasp that sentences originate and take their endless variety from within you, from your reading, your tactile memory for rhythms, your sense of the playfulness at the heart of the language, your perception of the world.”  Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing (p. 93).

 Take heart.  Take courage.  Take time.



 note: thanks to the slow mo guys for their inspiring slow-motion photography

While I was at Vermont College, I learned an insightful question, for women in particular, to ask of ourselves:  Who were you before you put yourself last?  For many of us, finding out who we were means looking back to when we were teens, when we first began thinking we understood what set us apart from the world and that we knew how we would live our lives.  We didn’t know, of course, but oh, the confidence of thinking we did.

I am enchanted by the ending of one of my favorite short stories, Bullet in the Brain by Tobias Wolff, when Anders, the main character, remembers how he once was “strangely roused, elated, by” the “pure unexpectedness” and “music” of words.  When we who are writers finally stake our claim upon words, how deeply satisfying it is to remember back when they first charmed us.

I am also mesmerized by a passage from This Boy’s Life – A Memoir  by Tobias Wolff, when he describes being a troubled young man at a tailor’s shop, outfitted in a black cashmere overcoat with a claret silk scarf, looking in a mirror:
     The elegant stranger in the glass regarded me with a doubtful, almost haunted expression.  Now that he had been called into existence, he seemed to be looking for some sign of what lay in store for him.
     He studied me as if I held the answer.
     Luckily for him, he was no judge of men.  If he had seen the fissures in my character he might have known what he was in for.  He might have known that he was headed for all kinds of trouble, and knowing this, he might have lost heart before the game even got started.
     But he saw nothing to alarm him.  He took a step forward, stuck his hands in his pockets, threw back his shoulders and cocked his head.  There was a dash of swagger in his pose, something of the stage cavalier, but his smile was friendly and hopeful.  (p. 275-6)

We do not know what lays in store for us, but there is joy in knowing that a writer’s career never ends – a writer can be published for as long as he or she can compose words.  And it doesn’t matter if what was written the day before was dribble.  Every day is a fresh opportunity, a clean slate to claim who we are.

Two of the best years of my life were spent earning my Master’s in Writing for Children and Young Adults at Vermont College, where I found a community that loved children’s literature as much as I do.  Vermont College provides a low-residency opportunity to delve deeply into the art of writing, an apprenticeship of learning in the midst of kindred spirits.  If you’d like to delve deeply into one aspect of writing—point of view—click here for my graduate lecture on this topic.

I’ve also attended writing workshops at the University of Iowa’s Summer Writing Festival, the Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators conferences, Hamline University’s MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults in St. Paul, and the Highlights Foundation workshops in Honesdale, Pennsylvania (see photos below).  To any and all of these opportunities, I say: sign up, pack your bags, and go!  If you’ve never attended any writing conferences, I recommend beginning with the Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators (SCBWI).

Just finished reading the intense We Were Liars by e. lockhart, which for good reason has been getting lots of buzz.  Beautifully written, great care taken with past and present tense, dark and emotional, a page turner.  Spoiler alert:  I sensed the twist/ending early on (though not the full scope of it) because of shades of The Sixth Sense and so many reviews raving about the shocking ending.   As a librarian, I read reviews before purchasing books, so I usually have a good sense of what the book's about before I get to read it.  With these reviews in mind, I read every word of this book intently (wondering all the time, what could be so shocking?), so I didn’t need to immediately re-read it as others have.  One thing that threw me for a minor loop through my intense reading, on the first page of the family tree, the main character Cadence’s last name is listed as “Easton,” but she refers to herself as Cadence Sinclair Eastman in the book.  I thought that was going to be one of the twists, but it turns out to just be a typo.   Like Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley, the ending left me unsettled, but in a good way.  Those last few lines made we wonder if I really understood Cadence’s character as the author intended.  I highly recommend this book – it will make you think and wonder and be a little…kinder.

John Corey Whaley.  Thank you for writing another book.  Noggin captured me from the first page, though I had to let go of my memories of reading Where Things Come Back and immerse myself in a completely different story.  Where Things Come Back was the kind of story, when I finished, I went back to the beginning and read all over again.  Other people have mentioned this in reviews, but so far I haven’t found anyone else having the same reason I had to read it again.  Spoiler alert.  When I read the end of Where Things Come Back, I wasn’t sure if the ending was happy or incredibly sad.  Most people who read it seem to think it’s happy.  Maybe that’s what Whaley intended.  But there were clues along the way that could make the ending sad.  When I re-read the book, I wrote all the clues down, studied them, and still didn’t know which way the ending went.  That’s ok with me.  I like being able to see it both ways.

Noggin is not happily ever after, either, but we have the feeling Travis will find his way.  A truly gifted writer (Whaley certainly is one) resonates with lots of people in different ways.  The most emotional scene for me in Noggin was when Travis held the hand of the little sister whose brother’s body was now Travis’s (you’ll have to read the book to understand what this is all about):

I looked over at her and I swear I felt something I’ve never felt before.  I felt like I knew this little kid, like I’d heard her voice before and felt her little hand in mine and seen her smile in the sunlight like that.  It was so familiar to me, and despite being completely absurd and illogical, I knew in that moment that I was not just Travis Coates who died and came back from the dead.  I was the older brother who she lost. (p.332)

I experienced something mystical like this years ago when one of my daughter’s classmates lost her mother.  One day at the high school parking lot while waiting to pick up my daughter, I saw this girl walking with her friends, and for a few moments I suddenly felt as if I was watching her through the eyes of her mother, as if her mother had taken over my eyesight to simply see her daughter being okay, being able to talk with friends, being able to laugh again.  I could not turn away from watching this girl through the sensation of her mother’s eyes, and just as I was wondering if I should get out of the car and follow the girl, a feeling of relief came over me, of the mother letting go.

Author Kate DiCamillo, in her 2014 Newbery medal acceptance speech, told of how, "[i]n the week after my mother died, I heard her say my name.  It was just once, and I was asleep.  The sound of her calling for me woke me up.  Her voice was younger, impatient, certain, hopeful.  It was the sound of her standing on the front porch steps, calling for me at dusk."

Mystical experiences like these, our most real moments of life, are never forgotten.  Artist Wanda Collins Johnson says, “Art is my way of keeping a record of the mystery of life…”  In his book, Ten Poems to Last a Lifetime, Roger Housden says, "Moments like these pass, but they leave a trace on the air we breathe.  I do not believe we are ever quite the same again, however transitory their visitations, however completely the everyday world seems to reassert itself (36)."

John Corey Whaley.  Thank you for keeping a record of the mystery of life. I hope you’re busy writing another book…

The 2014 Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, once again proved to be engaging and thought-provoking. 

Some quote highlights:
Write from a profound love of place…
The story begins with place.
William Kent Krueger

Everything comes from place – weather, climate, who the people are, what happens, how people react.
Julia Spencer Fleming

We will learn as much, or more, from our failures as we ever will from our successes.  Tap the deep roots of your own experience.
William Kent Krueger

In the midst of darkness, there is grace…there is part of you in every one of your characters, even the bad ones.
Julia Spencer Fleming

Everyone has the potential for good, but something happens along the way.
William Kent Krueger

“It is the business of writers as artists to write what haunts us…within the territory of belief.”
Valerie Sayers

What interests me?  What surprises me?
Pay attention – be attentive to every detail in describing something so someone else can see it.
What kind of work do you want your writing to do in the world?
Writing needs some provocative nature to it to be worthy of pursuing.
Reflections from Christine Byl, Peter Marty, and John T. Price

Advice is not meant to be taken; it’s meant to be considered.  Otherwise, advice would be a command.
Christine Byl

Does a story rattle your soul?  Why are certain stories retold?  Why are there certain stories in your family that you tell over and over?
Peter Orner

Community is walking side by side with those who make us feel uncomfortable.  Be biased in favor of community.  Love as best we know how.  Stories can provoke and provide powerful vulnerability.  Part of empathy is acknowledging privilege – appreciate what you have.  Try to understand everyone’s struggle.  Embrace the stories of those with whom we disagree.  Be gracious, compassionate, courageous.  Stories interweave in sacred spaces.  When you forget the people in the story, you have lost the story.
Reflections from Jeff Chu