Category: Literary Life Observations

“He is not, as children’s book writers are often supposed, an everyman’s grandpapa.”

It’s kind of a joke, the idea of suffering for one’s art. We’ve gotten away from the starving artist in the garret, looking emaciated, and, for some reason, French, with beautifully miserable eyes, like those horrifying poodle portraits painted on velvet that your grandma used to have.

But… artists — writers — do suffer.
In the last three weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of queasy hanging over the virtual toilet of my mind, and retching. I’ve torn apart a hundred and sixty-one pages of a manuscript — unfinished, mind you — six times, and now I’ve rewritten forty pages of it to my satisfaction. (Not really. “Satisfaction” means I know I have to move forward at some point, so am sitting on my hands to leave that bit of it alone.) I’ve received a letter from a former student, asking me to mentor her, that is sitting unanswered in my inbox. I’ve realized I’m supposed to be a contributing member of the Poetry Princesses, and find it a stretch some weeks just to participate in Poetry Friday. My writing, at this point, sucks.

So, reading what Maurice Sendak said about his made me want to cry.

Never mind that Mr. Sendak’s originality and emotional honesty have changed the shape of children’s literature; that his work is featured in museums; that he has designed costumes and sets for operas, ballets and theater; that he has won a chest full of awards and prizes including a National Medal of the Arts. As the playwright Tony Kushner, one of his collaborators, said, “He’s one of the most important, if not the most important, writers and artists ever to work in children’s literature. In fact, he’s a significant writer and artist in literature. Period.”

Mr. Sendak protested, “But Tony is my friend.”

All of the publishing contracts, all of the awards, all of the applause, and Mr. Sendak can’t really feel it. Like rubber bullets, the wonder has not penetrated. It makes sense to me to not be able to feel a constant awe about my writing — I know the truth about my work. But Maurice Sendak expanded what subjects were permissible to be broached with picture books. He truly pioneered the concept of …honesty.

Do we ever get to the place where we feel like what we do has relevance; that we are not just sort of making faces to entertain anonymous masses? Especially today, when we are reminded that there is so much in the world that is colder and darker and sharper-edged, does writing fiction, and making art ever feel like… enough?

Thanks to Liz in Ink for the NY Times link.

Yes, I know. We are all done discussing Mr. Sparkles and the Swan Formerly Known As Bella. However, SB Sarah has done one of the best close readings and most intelligent literary criticisms I’ve read thus far on the mystery of The Bespangled One. She answers the question “What Is It About Edward?” beautifully.

A single paragraph that just made me want to go back and write more literary criticism for English:

He tames his desire to kill her and eat her, but he still consumes her, which is the point that made me the most uncomfortable, but may also serve as a primary reference as to why Edward is so alluring a character. While Edward and Bella don’t knock boots in Twilight, Edward manages to insert himself figuratively into her life and become the center of every moment of Bella’s life – and she’s all for it. More than one person commented to me privately after reading my review that the manner in which Bella subsumes her identity and becomes absorbed by Edward almost symbiotically made them as readers profoundly uncomfortable, because it echoed abusive relationships they witnessed or experienced. It wasn’t romantic for them, that totalitarian management – it was creepy.

Word.

Are you reading?
Chapters 1-3

A Tale of Two Cities even smells classic, which probably has more to do with the age of this paperback, and the length of time since it’s been opened than anything else… but, I digress! The book opens with the most famous Dickensian lines, quoted badly by nearly everybody. A lot of people like to wax eloquent on “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” but few people have actually noticed that Dickens was being fairly ironic. His next few passages indicate that the world was simply not that great, either in France or in England. On the night the Dover mail comes up the hill, in the muck and mire, the passengers on-foot, highwaymen are feared when a message comes for a man named Mr. Lorry of Tellson’s bank. The message he receives, and the reply he sends to the soaked and harried courier are confusing, but deliciously mysterious.

Even more confusing is the following chapter, where the message is debated. Could someone really have been buried — for eighteen years — and recalled to life?

All of this is couched in Dickens’ lyrical prose, sometimes mouthfuls of words, sometimes shorter sentences, which might come as a relief if one is lost in his perambulations. I enjoy the way he plays with words, and the way that the story is furled up tightly and anonymously in this storyteller’s cant. You won’t know anything — plot, characters, motivation — until he’s ready to tell you. In the hands of a master storyteller, one can simply enjoy the spooling out the prose as the tale is revealed.

Seventy years of writing comes down to basically a screaming fight. That’s really sad.

Seventy years of writing comes down to basically a screaming fight. That’s really sad.

I love my job. I love writing, writing about and talking about books.
However, it’s sometimes hard to square what is essentially a job in entertainment with a world that isn’t entirely free to be at ease and entertained.

What does it mean, when you are a writer, that people are starving in Haiti, Egypt and the Philippines? That there’s a massive drought in Australia, and a food crisis in South Asia? People have always starved, it’s endemic to poverty — the poor we always have with us, after all — but things have been drifting quietly downstream for some time now, and in the distance is the roaring sound of the rapids.

…and yet I’m writing books. Is this the best use of my time?

Common sense suggests that paddling this canoe now won’t even slightly delay our rush toward white water, but that’s not why I’m still writing — I’m writing because I believe in the power of stories. I do. I think that’s a core belief — something I believe in as strongly as a religious creed. I believe in the power of story.

I remember feeling quite moved when so many SCBWI authors and authors-to-be sent books and flashlights to the kids caught in the Katrina floods, and knowing that if I was miserably hot and stuck with thousands of people in a sticky, crowded, dark room, facing The End of Life As I’d Known It with nothing but the grubby clothes on my back and a few damp possessions — maybe –, I’d want something else — quick — that said, “Once upon a time,” and ended somewhere else, maybe not with “Happily Ever After,” but with “Happily, Not Here.” I believe in the power of stories to distract and distance us from the unpleasant. I’m big on escapism — sometimes it is A Good Thing.

I also believe in the power of stories to teach. Just the other day, when we all rocked the readergirlz TBD, I was cheered to know that hundreds of hospitalized teens would now have a chance to be distracted — but more than that, to be taught. So many books have taught us. We know about cancer and diabetes, revolutions, wars and life as immigrants. We can’t really be afraid when we know things. Prejudices and terrors stem from what we don’t know. When we read, we learn. I believe in the power of learning things to shine a light on our fear.

Story was my lifeline when I was a kid.
Stories are my lifeline as… an older kid.

Yet, the food crisis thing. Starvation. Not just kids, but everyone in some countries. Somewhere the obnoxious idealist in me is shrieking, “Somebody should do something!!!”

I know who ‘somebody’ is – it’s me.

So, I’m writing.
And thinking of what else to do.