Nancy Springer's Blog: Last Seen Wandering Vaguely - Posts Tagged "imagination"

My mother put two priorities ahead of all else: her artwork – among other things, she painted pet portraits -- and what my father called her “damn dogs.” Under the kennel name “Banba” she raised Shelties aka Shetland sheep dogs aka miniature collies. These were simultaneously my playmates and her show dogs. Due to the dogs, quite early in my life I learned what Ursula Le Guin later called “The Rule of Names,” because for days on end my mother pondered aloud the naming of pedigreed puppies. Her demeanor impressed upon me that the bestowing of names was a serious, mystical, even fateful process. Each puppy needed its very own exact, condign name in order to be all it could be.

The magic of naming didn’t stop there. Unless it was heavily raining (cold and snow didn’t count), I was expected to spend daylight hours outside, roaming from the Passaic river swamp through the farm fields and woodlots and along the brook up into the forest on Riker’s hill. From those expeditions, I generally brought home something for Mom to admire and, with the assistance of a twelve-volume nature encyclopedia, name. Spring beauty, cardinal flower, deadly nightshade, praying mantis, puffball mushroom, scarlet tanager, Dutchman’s breeches, lady’s slipper; there was no end to the romance of names. A garter snake was named after the striped thing that held up a man’s stockings in the old days. “Daisy” meant “day’s eye.” A painted turtle was not a tortoise but a box turtle was. Bloodroot was used to make red dye. A trout lily’s petals were speckled like the fish; look inside. See?

I saw. “Look!” must have been Mom’s favorite word. No wonder she was a visual artist. About a dozen times a day she’d cry, “Nancy, look! Look at the chickadees!” Or the mockingbird, or the wild phlox, or the sunset, or the frost on the window, or how green the grass was. She gifted me with her joy of seeing; I could find something to look at anywhere: sunshine on rust, a rainbow in an oil slick. Given that the root word of “imagination” is “image,” and fiction writing is primarily visual, my mother raised a writer without knowing it.

She achieved the same unforeseen end by being a role model of priorities. First and foremost, she did not give a flying rat’s hind end about housework. Dirty dishes could sit for days; her art came first. She was also indifferent to material acquisitions, especially for kids. I had few clothes and even fewer toys. Instead of indulging in retail therapy, Mom painted, drew, pampered her dogs, looked at the birds, and sang. She made a great act for me to follow later on later on when, between book sales, I needed to live on air and dreams.

Child care was not any higher than housework in Mom’s priorities. It was enough if my brothers and I had something with which to cover our nakedness and food-like substances to eat; ketchup counted as a vegetable. Yet, although our greasy hair, hand-me-down clothes and the holes in our underwear were perfectly okay with our mother, the least hint of shabby grammar caused her visible distress, and she would fix it immediately. Both she and my father spoke correct English naturally and fluently; “ain’t” was unheard of. I remember showing off a school report, A+, in which Mom found an error the teacher had missed; I had used “it’s” instead of “its” throughout. She also found a grammar error in my first published novel, and did not hesitate to point it out to me.

To become a writer, of course I had to be a reader first. But, while the house was full of books, and while Mom and Dad were readers, they did not feel it necessary to encourage their children to read; rather the opposite. Reading was only for rainy days and nighttime; otherwise we were supposed to be outside, getting fresh air and exercise. Thus, reading became a restricted pleasure, highly to be desired.

Somehow amid all that exercise, Mom and Dad found time to play Scrabble, and I played with them. We explored the improbabilities of English spelling. In hindsight, their patience amazes me, because they were not, in general, easygoing parents. They were quite stern.

Which leads me to one more thing Mom did that helped me become a writer: she gave me a great deal of benign neglect. Despite being an enthusiastic teacher, she was not at all a good listener, especially not when she was painting. Also, children were to be seen (greasy hair and all) but not heard. So I developed an intense emotional need to express myself, to tell my stories to anyone who would listen, or write them for anyone who would read them.

Please do not consider any of this as guidelines for raising a writer. Other circumstances contributed; otherwise my upbringing might have resulted in nothing more than a normal, garden-variety neurotic. By modern standards, Mom was far from being a perfect parent. But in some unconventional ways, she was a very good parent. As a role model, she was purely and simply who she was. And consequently, so am I.