Kelly Barnhill's Blog, page 11

Please play this video to all the fabulous, amazing butt-kicking teachers in your life.

I think we need a new holiday. We can call it Make A Teacher A Delicious Cake Day. Or Give A Teacher A Pedicure Day. Or Hook A Teacher Up To A Wine I.V. Day. Something like that.

Teachers rule. You know it; I know it. Anyone who says differently is not allowed in my house or at my dinner table. Observe:

I just finished week #2 at Roosevelt High School, and I continue to be blown away by these kids – and even more blown away by these teachers. The two women who have graciously opened their classrooms to me are amazing. They are tough, funny, compassionate, razor-sharp, and built of stronger stuff than I am, I’ll tell you what. And they love those kids. And the students love them in return.

The student body at Roosevelt is remarkably diverse – racially, economically, religiously, as well as their educational backgrounds. What unites them is their kindness. These kids, man. They are kind. 

Within each classroom there is a broad skill-level range (extreme low-performers, extreme high-performers, and everything in-between), but each child – regardless of where they’re coming from – is charged with the same thing:  do your best; learn the material; don’t make excuses.

There were some kids in class today who, due to a cascade of reasons outside their control, happen to be reading way below grade-level. It happens. And yet, they still had lots to write about. Their imaginations were vigorous and intense, and when they looked inside to find the stories of their own, they realized that they had much to say. There was one kid who reads at a third-grade level, and yet when given a prompt and a little guidance, cranked out six pages of fiction in a half an hour. And it was good. 

Nice work, kid.

Whenever I do these teaching gigs, I am reminded how hard – how very hard - this job is. Right now, my voice is sore, my legs ache, and I feel like my body has spent the last six hours having tennis balls chucked at it. My head hurts, my skin hurts, and I think about nine million germs are having a party in my sinuses.

I think most of us forget how physically demanding it is to just be in a high school, much less teach in one. And Roosevelt is not even that large a school – less than a thousand students. Still. The crush of kids, the cloud of hormones, the din of voices shooting this way and that. Each one of these kids is like a nuclear reactor about to blow – all their love and hurt and hope and rage and lust and confusion and questions and knowledge – it boils and churns and accretes inside them. They are nacent stars. They are supernovas. They are quasars. Steam shoots out their ears and their skin bubbles and smokes and splits. They are a fury of kinetic energy and potential energy. They are both particle and wave.

It’s fucking hard being a teenager. Each one of them deserves a goddamn medal.

I got home, after being in that radioactive, glorious, primordial stew, and collapsed in bed. I am exhausted. I am ravaged. I am spent. My eyes are raw. My bones are made of glass. I am Chernobyl. I am Love Canal. I’m the friggin’ Bikini Atoll.

Teachers go through this every day. Teachers take these burning hunks of radioactive particles, and transform them into stars.

Good work, teachers. And God bless you.

(And Ms. Sheehan, Ms. Ober: My glass. It is raised.)

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Roosevelt High School, teachers, why I love teaching

First Lines (again)

Last week I started my long-term artist residency at Roosevelt High school, and it has been awesome. The kids are engaged, the teachers are passionate – it’s all you can hope for in a writers residency.

I’m here today. It continues to be awesome.

One of my favorite things to do with a school group is an exercise in writing opening lines – the initial breath of a story that hasn’t been written yet, but that the student themselves would like to read some day. What interests me most in these workshops is to get kids to engage with the kind of stories that hook them individually as readers. Now, I have a selfish ulterior motive in this – I am an omnivoratious reader, and find myself personally grooving on lots and lots of different kinds of stories. One thing I tell my students all the time is the simple fact that writers, in the end, are selfish. We write to entertain ourselves. We read to entertain ourselves. It’s one of the few perks of this lonely, lonely job.

So whatever. I’m super selfish. Sue me.

Anyway, the problem with coming into a classroom to do a writer’s workshop is hesitation. We have a limited amount of time, and the kids are naturally hesitant. Well, of course they are!  I’m a complete stranger, after all, and I’m asking them to remove all pretense and self-consciousness and to sit down and write stuff. Madness!

So, we start with first lines. First lines are fun because they shine a light onto the story as it can be while still being a story all on its own. And that’s exciting. And it tricks the kids into engaging their imaginations, their what-if muscles, and it tricks them into writing even when they aren’t writing.

Here’s some of what they came up with:

I was used to waking up to the smell of burnt bacon.
I’m only eighteen, and I haven’t seen the world.
A rush of cool breeze crawled up my arms.
Not just darkness, but the silent kind.
She opened the book, and then she disappeared.
The sun set at the far end of the dusty road.
He was the child of no one.
We were happy. That’s when everything changed.
The wind of the world washed everything away.
Damn him and his luck.
I wasn’t anyone worth knowing. That’s what made me special.
When I woke up, I was already dead. That’s what they told me, anyway.
I heard a voice whisper in my ear, but when I turned, only the wind was there.
Night was scary, but I was scarier.
Don’t believe anything I’m about to say.
His face was the perfect frame for the bright red outline of my fist.
I told her to stop, and she didn’t. I told her to run, and she wouldn’t.
Whatever you do, don’t read to the end.
Her wedding dress lay on the street, wet and muddy.
They emerged from the burning tree.

And, of course, my favorite, “Once upon a f***ing time.”

Onward!

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Amazing high school students, residency, teaching writing

Bevies of Boys

Here’s the thing about winter in Minnesota: we complain about it (and, thanks to social media, we now complain to an international audience), but secretly we love it. We love the challenge, we love the beauty, we love the thrill of the Man vs. Nature conflict. We love the elemental, primal pain of the freeze of skin, the bite of wind, the soul-crushing squeak of a boot against the ice. We love it.

Here’s the thing about this last winter: even people who love the winter got sick of this dang winter. It was the pitbull of winters – the jaws locked, and it did not let go.

Until Friday.

At this time last week, I was shoveling thick, heavy, pitiless snow.

By Friday, I looked out my window and there stood my son surrounded by nine other boys from the neighborhood. All were holding a bike or a scooter, or some kind of wheeled implement of motion. All were sweaty, filthy and smiling. And none of them was wearing a shirt.

For the next sixty hours, the street rang with the calls of boys. (Girls too, but the girls on my block are quieter than the boys. Which is not to say they are quiet – they aren’t. But those boys are friggin’ LOUD.) And it was glorious.

Now here’s the thing about my neighborhood. First of all, it rules. I love everyone on my block. Knock on a house, and a writer answers the door – or an artist or a graphic designer, or a builder, or a small business owner, or a social worker, or a teacher, or a free-thinker, or whatever – and offers you a beer. There are front-yard bonfires and massive easter egg hunts and random coffee-klatches that last for days. A collection of smart, deep-thinking, widely read, independent, creative people, and I love them all. And the kids! Crowds and crowds of kids. They run from yard to yard, tangling in alleys and livingrooms, crowding into the playhouse in the back, running wild in the field behind my house. They make discoveries in the creek, make plans under the bridge, and build new worlds in the trees. There are twenty-seven kids living on my block (and two more on the way), and it rules.

The boys shed their shirts on Friday and didn’t put them back on until the start of school on Monday (with protests). They are drunk on spring. They are high on sunshine and dirt and mud and water and skin and one another. Tomorrow, for May Day, the temperatures will drop, and the snow will fall – in great gushes – once again. No matter. The game continues. The shirts will shed. The boys have declared their Summer Reign, and they will not be vanquished.

Every time I see them howling outside, I think of a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, called “Epithalmion”. Here’s a bit of it:

“By there comes a listless stranger: beckoned by the noise

He drops towards the river: unseen

Sees the bevy of them, how the boys

With dare and with downdolphinry and bellbright bodies huddling out,

Are earthworld, airworld, waterworld thorough hurled, all by turn and turn about.”

Happy Spring, everyone!

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: it takes a village or something, raising boys

In which Mysterious Things are observed in the forest.

Today, I took a long, sweaty run along the creek, past the falls, along the upper lip of the Mississippi gorge and onto the forested trail that leads to Fort Snelling. It’s one of my favorite runs and it was marvelous. Along the way, I saw two coyotes, fifteen wood ducks, three bald eagles, several turkeys, a raccoon and…..

a pair of shoes.

So I stopped. I’ve never seen a pair of shoes sitting by the side of the trail. Nothing else – no keys, no socks, no discarded bag. Nothing. Just a pair of shoes.

And they were nice shoes. Italian, by the look of them. They were square-toed, slim men’s shoes. Nice leather. Polished. Sitting side by side, slightly pigeon-toed, in the scrubby grass next to the trail. They looked like they might take a notion to walk away, un-footed.  They were shoes with attitude, shoes with purpose. Shoes that were going places.

“Anybody lose some shoes?” I called out.

The wind answered, the sky answered, the rushing river answered. The birds overhead. The scurrying rodents in the crinkling masses of last year’s leaves. They all answered, though not in any language I could speak.

There was nothing for it. I kept running until I reached that old Fort looking over the confluence of the rivers – where the milky Minnesota meets the wild Mississippi. When I turned back, I ran straight for the shoes.

Because the shoes, to my mind, seemed like some sort of sign. They were shoes with answers. These shoes – they meant something, you know? They belonged to a man with delicate feet. A man unused to walking on a ragged path. They belonged to a man who stopped to give his shoes a buff in the middle of a forest trail, before he took wing, lifted up, flew away.

I imagined him launching skyward, his long coat and loose pants flapping around his narrow body like feathers until he disappeared in the clouds.

This is what I believed as I pounded up the path.

This is what I believed as I approached the spot.

But the shoes – along with their flying, winged, magical owner -were gone.

Theories?

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Fort Snelling State Park, Magical Realism, mysterious shoes

Happy Birthday, Mom!

Today is my mother’s birthday. She is awesome. Here is a story that tells you pretty much everything you need to know about her:

Back in the early nineties, when I was in high school, my parents took my sister and I to see Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie performing at Northrop Auditorium at the University. My sister and I were dubious, but we went and enjoyed ourselves (because, let’s be honest, Pete Seeger is an adorable human being).

Anyway, on the afternoon before we went to the concert,  I came home from school and my mom was in the kitchen. Her cheeks were flushed; her eyes were bright.

“I did something,” my mom said.

Oh god, I thought. “What?” I said.

“Well,” my mom said. “I made a song request. For the concert.”

“What?” I said. “How?”

“Well, I really wanted him to sing ‘I’m gonna be an engineer’, you know, for my teenaged daughters.”

“And?”

“And I figured that if he’s performing at Northrop, he’s probably staying at the Radisson nearby, so I called the front desk and asked to be transferred to Pete Seeger’s room.”

“You didn’t.”

“I did. They said he wasn’t available.”

Mom, I thought. Honestly.

“So I left a message. And he’s probably gotten it by now, and maybe he’ll sing the song.”

There was so much wrong here, I didn’t even know where to begin.

“Mom,” I said, speaking very, very slowly. “There is no way that your message is getting anywhere near Pete Seeger. This is the silliest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Well,” my mom said, utterly unflapped by my wet-blanket predictions. “We’ll see.” And then she started humming.

That night, we went to the concert. My sister (who is a year younger than me) next to one another and our parents on either side.

And Pete Seeger gets on stage. And he starts talking to the audience about “the folk process” and how all folk music originates with grandmas – the songs that grandmas sing to their grandbabies. And he sings this totally adorable little song (one that I would, years later, sing to my own three kids) – “Creepy crawly little mousie from the barnie to the housie”, etc. and makes the audience sing with him. And he can do this because he is Pete Seeger, and utterly adorable. With his banjo. So everyone in the audience is singing and giggling and relaxed and prepared for a perfectly nice time with some folksy icons.

And then he says this:

“Speaking of grandmothers, my sister is a grandmother now. Great folk singer too. About twenty years ago, she wrote this song about a young woman making a path for herself, despite everything in her way. It was a pretty good song. And today, some woman called my hotel room and asked me to sing it for her two teenaged daughters. Seemed like a good idea to me.”

No, I thought.

It can’t be, I thought.

And my mom was elbowing me madly, her face shining like a dang jewel. She bounced in her chair. She poked my sister.

“He’s talking about me,” she whispered at my sister.

“He is not, mom,” my sister hissed. “Goll!”

“Actually….” I whispered back. I couldn’t even say it.

And then, goddamnit, he sang “I’m gonna be an engineer.” Because of my glorious mom – who also made a path for herself, in spite of her wet-blanket teenaged daughters standing in her way.

Happy birthday, Mom. Thank you for your enthusiasm, your support, your can-do spirit, your magnificent heart, your relentless positivity, your undying love, and your willingness to call random famous people in their hotel rooms, just so they will sing me a song. I love you more than I can ever say.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Regarding Harper

 

I just wanted to give you guys an update on my crazy dog, Harper – who, as I have mentioned before on this blog, may or may not be 1,000 years old, who we brought to the wilderness of the BWCA and she almost did not come back. Who, back in February, laid down in my office, and couldn’t get back up.

Well?

She’s great.

She rallied.

We’ve had this dog since 1998 – the vet thought she was between 3 and 5 at the time – so she’s some age that would require math for me to figure out right now. (Stupid math.) She blew out her knee, and we had to lay rugs all around the house so that she could get around (wood floors were a problem). She refused to drink water, so I had to trick her by diluting beef broth. I had to coax her to eat her pain meds with cream cheese, and then when she wised up, hot dogs, and then again when she wised up I bought fancy goose pate from the fancy foods store. She loved it. Smart girl, that Harper.

My daughter, who usually takes her on her walks, started just taking her to the end of the block and back, and even then, she’d have to lay down and rest.

Slowing down, we thought. Months, not years, we thought.

And then, she could make it to the end of the block.

And then, she could make it much farther than the end of the block. Ella took her on walks along the creek. First to the low bridge. Then the high bridge. Then all the way to the Falls.

Last weekend, we took her on a three mile walk. She loved it. She’s not on pain meds anymore and she can finally make it up and down the stairs with ease. Her appetite has normalized,  she no longer needs to be tricked into drinking water, and – while she can’t go for a run anymore, and three miles seems to be her limit – she is utterly back to normal.

Which brings me back to my original set of assumptions: 1. Harper is magic. 2. Harper is one thousand years old. 3. Harper will outlive us all.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: family pets, Harper the Wonder Dog, magic animals

I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.

Dearest Readers,

Have you noticed that I haven’t been posting much lately? I have noticed and I am sorry. I am, right now, engaged in the process of novel revision, which means that I have lined my pockets with lead and have covered myself with post-it notes and have dangled baubles from every conceivable extremity, and then set out to run a marathon.

Or, I have engaged in the total reconstruction of a many-gabled house, with only my hammer, my hand-saw, a bucket of nails, and my own strong back, and I have to thread a new support system all on my own self.

Or I am trying to balance a boulder on the tip of a toothpick.

Or I am digging for treasure using an infant’s spoon.

Or something.

In the meantime, I thought I’d share some snippets of pieces that are currently on the desktop (because, of course, I am also writing short stories. I love extra work. And punishments.) And it occurs to me that I would very much like to see what you are working on. Because why should I be the only sharer here?

I’ll tell you what: I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. In the comments section, copy out a paragraph or two of something you’re working on. Pretty please? I’d love to see it.

Here. I’ll start.

From “The Invisible Dog”

My name is Jackson Marks and I have an invisible dog.
 I know what you’re thinking.
But it isn’t like that, I swear.
I’ve had him now for six years. I don’t know how old he was when he showed up, but he hasn’t grown. The top of his head reaches my knee. He’s got wiry fur and skinny legs and a tail that whips me in the face when he jumps in my bed and turns around and around until he finds a comfortable spot. And good god. He reeks. I suppose he’d smell better if I washed him – and believe me, I’ve tried. But he’s invisible. And he doesn’t like baths. So.

And then, from “The Unlicensed Magician”:

The junk man’s only daughter slides along the back of the low, one-roomed building that houses the constable’s office. The alley lights are out again – energy crisis. It is always an energy crisis. She appreciates the dark. She presses her hands against the wall, curling her fingers into the bricks. The sun is down and the moon isn’t up yet. The night air is a puckering cold, but the wall is still warm, and so are her hands. She can hear the constable inside, explaining things to the Inquisitor.
“I don’t care what you think you’ve heard, sonny,” she hears the old man say, “there ain’t been a whiff of magic anywhere in the county, nigh on fifteen years. Not a drop. Now you can write that down on your report and send it on up to your superiors. You got bad information is all. And not the first time, neither.”
  A scribble of pen on paper.
 An old man’s harrumph.

And then, from “Mrs. Sorensen and the Sasquatch”:

The day she buried her husband – a good man, by all accounts, though shy, not given to drink orfoolishness; not one for speeding tickets or illegal parking or cheating on his taxes; not one for carousing at the county fair, or tomcatting with the other men from the glass factory; which is to say, he was utterly unknown in town: a cipher; a cold, blank space – Agnes Sorensen arrived at the front steps of Our Lady of the Snows. The priest had been waiting for her at the open door.  The air was wet and sweet with autumn rot, and though it had rained earlier, the day was starting to brighten, and would surely be lovely in an hour or two. Mrs. Sorensen greeted the priest with a sad smile. She wore a smart black hat, sensible black shoes, and a black silk dress belted at the waist. Two white mice peeked out of her left breast pocket – each one tiny shock of fur, with pink, quivering noses and red, red tongues.

So what’s on your computer right now? Or your notebooks or scratch paper or napkins? Share, please!

Love,

Kelly

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Bigfoot, fiction, love, Magic, Magical Realism, short stories

The First Fifty Pages of the Middle Grade Novel

By the way, time is running out to sign up for my class at the Loft – starting on March 19. It’s called the First Fifty Pages of the Middle Grade Novel, which makes its topic and focus pretty self explanatory. In essence, as writers for this audience, our stories success hinges on how well we can hook the habitual readers – the kids who always have a book in their back pockets, or under their beds, or tucked under the crook of their arms. Those are the kids who shove our books into their friends’ hands, telling them breathlessly to read this at once. These are the kids who insist that their teachers read our books or who hand it to their favorite librarian and insist, possibly while jumping, that they read this now.

These kids rule.

Hooking those kids, and doing it in those crucial first fifty pages, is crucial, and it’s what we talk about in this class. I work my students pretty hard. I read their first fifty pages of their WIPs pretty carefully, and give them intensive exercises during class and homework and reading and whatever. And, you know what? It’s pretty fun.

Think about it. Here’s the link.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Childrens literature, Middle Grade Novels, writing classes

Things that shouldn’t exist:

1. Splinters. Look. Splinters are jerks. You know it, I know it. Also, I think they secretly want to kill us. Which, let’s face it, is rude. We are in my house, as I have mentioned before, in a state of project-doing. My husband is building a new family room in the basement, so that our current family room in the attic can be transformed into two rooms – a bedroom for my thirteen year old and an art-space/study-space for the family. So my house is loud. And dusty. And filled with splinters. Which means that I am pulling splinters out of the fingers of my family. Here’s the thing about splinters – they hurt like the dickens when they go in, but they hurt way worse coming out. So in order to relieve the pain, you must, on the people you love so dear, inflict more pain. It’s terrible. I had a doosy on my hand, and foolishly decided to just keep it clean and let it work it’s way out. Then my hand swelled up. Thank god for antibiotics. Did you know that Calvin Coolidge’s son died of a blister that he got playing tennis. Within days of the blister, he swelled up, streaked red, and died. Awful things. You know what else shouldn’t exist? Stupid blisters. Jerks.

2. Tea. I know. I love tea. Tea shows up in every book and story that I write. Tea accompanies me on my life’s various journeys. I’ve drunk tea on a sand dune in Morocco, and next to a glacial lake on a mountain in Washington and outside a bug-infested motel in Key Largo and in the early morning dawn in the BWCA. I have never, in all of my adult life, had a morning without tea. But right now, tea is my enemy. On Monday morning, a steaming mug slipped from my fingers and gurgled its contents all over my computer. My lovely little Macbook Air. My beautiful Esmerelda! Her condition is yet unknown. She is sitting, right now, in a box of rice, and I am praying for her recovery. Tea! YOU ARE DEAD TO ME!

3. Snow-covered ice patches.  So far, two of my neighbors have nasty bruises, another neighbor is possibly-concussed, I have a bigger-than-a-grapefruit-sized bruise on my poor, sorry arse, AND, most upsettingly, my kid, at school, during pick-up, slipped under my only-just-stopped car (I still am having panic attacks about that one. He’s fine, I’m fine, and the school has fixed the slopey ramp that is supposed to be for wheel chairs but had been an icy slick leading small children straight into the street. I’m not over it. My god.) I love Minnesota so very much. I love her seasons. I love her wintery winds and her stunning falls and her sultry summers. I love the promise and dynamism of spring. But ice? Screw it.

4. Lice. For real you guys. On Sunday, just as I’m getting the kids ready for church, my son comes into the kitchen and tells me that his head is itchy. “It’s just dry skin,” I said. “I think it might be lice,” he said. “Impossible,” I told him. “Barnhills don’t get lice.” That, my friends, is called hubris. And so far it has been true. I’ve been parenting now for almost fourteen years, and nary a nit has crossed my threshold. Until now. I did a perfunctory check of Leo’s head. He was crawling with bugs. I grabbed a tupperware, and started picking louse after louse and tossing them in. Leo was thrilled. “I want to keep them,” he said. “As pets. That’s Rodney. That’s Oscar. That’s Reggie.” But seriously, WHY DO THESE THINGS EXIST? They only eat us. They do not jump. They do not fly. They only crawl and fall. AND, they die within twenty four hours of being away from a host. They simultaneously disprove both evolution and intelligent design – because natural selection should have done away with these jokers years ago, and there is no way that any Designer worth his salt would have come up with such a dumb, useless, friggin’ annoying creature. Honestly. If you serve no purpose, get off the bus. That’s my philosophy.

5. Gum.  When I was going through Leo’s hair, I found something else hiding in the thistledown mop that he was trying (and failing) to grow out: Gum. (Why was he trying to grow out his hair? Because his big cousin Micah had long hair, and my boy hero-worships that kid. He wishes he had a big brother, but Micah is all he gets. And oh! How he loves him! So he wouldn’t let me near his head with a scissors, and what grew on that cute little skull was nothing short of a disaster. Part cottonwood seed, part river reeds, part autumn leaf pile, part barbed wire. What a mess.) The gum was a small chunk, about the size of pea, and it looked like it had been there for a while – I wondered why he wouldn’t let me near him with a comb. “I look FINE, mom!” he’d say. (He didn’t.) It was hard and shiny, like amber or glass. I wondered if it had artifacts inside. Or fossils. Or perfectly-preserved prehistoric bugs. Doesn’t matter now. Hair is buzzed. Gum and nit free. WE ARE SAVED!

Which reminds me.

THINGS I’M THANKFUL FOR:

1. Hair buzzers.

 

Filed under: Uncategorized

Theories Of Revision

I am, and have been for the last week, engaged in the revision of my new book, The Witch’s Boy. Actually, I’ve been engaged in a lot of things lately – new short stories, two new novels, a novella, a weird research project that had, until last week, soundly kicked my poor arse. But the dominant thing – the substance of the day - has been Witch’s Boy. Even when I’m not working on it I’m working on it, you know?

(This is a thing I tell my students all the time. “What do I do if I get stuck on a project?” they ask. “Start a new project,” I say. Because nothing greases the gears of work like work. And nothing ensures that the stuck stays stuck like stagnation. I avoid stagnation like the plague. If I am stuck, I write a poem. Or a blog post. Or I start a new story – sometimes knowing full well that I won’t finish it for years. Or I do research on …. some damn thing. Or I draw. Or I work longhand on the other novel that I’m not really writing right now. And I write notes on the primary project. The side projects shed light on the primary task. They are my little flashlights in the dusty gloom.)

Anyway, Witch’s Boy. New publisher, new editor. New energy, new life. I love it. I’m incredibly lucky that, so far, with my three novels, I’ve worked with three very different, and very brilliant, editors. All of whom have challenged me to push myself into new territory. All of which have helped me to visualize the path from where the book is now, to where it can be. Where it ought to be. And frankly, where it wants to be.

And so there are theories. Of how this happens. Because sometimes you need a metaphor. Sometimes you need a construct to explain the reason why you’ve been sitting at your desk for so long that you can’t feel your butt muscles and your fingers feel like they are built out of shattered glass.

THEORY #1 – ENTYMOLOGY

Last week, on Facebook, I wrote this:

I got my editorial letter.

You know the process that a caterpillar goes through? How they wrap themselves up, and their bodies literally UNMAKE THEMSELVES. How they turn into a mushy, gooey, primordial ooze before re-assembling their cells into the form of a butterfly. How their skeleton forms filament by filament, increasing their discomfort by degrees, how they emerge, spitting and clawing and gasping, only to find themselves brand new again, exhausted and astonished, a damp, leaking mess, and defenseless on the ground?

Well, I’m in the the second part. Primordial ooze. And it is AWESOME.

I’m also forcing myself to refrain from getting to work on it until Monday. So for now, I am in that buzzy, tingly, crinkly, crackly, EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE phase. It’s a good phase.

This is a real thing. The unmaking. The unravelling. The questioning everything. This is the place where the book goes quiet. Where the writer goes quiet. Where the writer can be found, sitting on a couch, clutching her tea, and thinking. This is where long walks are helpful. Or a quiet cross-country ski through a wood. Or a long, long run. The story, once hard and brittle in the mind, once a living, ruddy organism, happily gorging itself on milkweed, becomes quiet. Dormant. As silent as leaves. Don’t be fooled. There are dynamic things happening inside.

THEORY #2 – CONSTRUCTION

Nine years ago, almost, we bought this house. It was too small for us and it reeked of cigarettes and talcum powder and mildew. But it was right on park land and fields and had a view of Minnehaha Creek and was on a dead end street. So we bought it. And then my husband tore off the roof and started to build.

I don’t know if you’ve ever lived through a construction project (the fact that I survived with two little ones and a new one on the way is something that astonishes me every day) but it sucks. Immensely. There’s dust everywhere. Nothing looks right. Nothing is clean. Debris and tools and supplies eat into the tiny amounts of living space that you’ve set aside. There are strangers in your house. Sometimes, things that you liked have to go forever.

When your editor walks through the house you built, sometimes you have to prepare yourself for bad news. “Yep,” she says. “You see this beam? It’s cracked. And pockmarked. And it makes a weird angle over here. You need to replace it with something else.”

And you imagine the work that it will take you to prop up the house and slide in a beam that will last. And you’ll do it, right? Because we can’t have a house that will fall. That’s just dangerous.

And then your editor goes upstairs. And she says, “You see here? You’ve got four rooms with sealed-up doors. And over here? A room that’s just been plastered over. Don’t you want to see what’s inside?”

And yes! I do! I really do.

And then she says, “Really? No bathroom?”

And then she says, “Oh! Look at the light in the livingroom. And look at the pleasant spaces! And look at how lovely it sits on the hill!” And you know you’ve built something broken, but something good. And you know you’ll do whatever it takes to make it strong, solid and lasting.

THEORY #3 – THE JOURNEY

When I write books, it’s like I’m on a thousand mile journey with a bag over my head. Or, no….. It’s like I’m on a thousand mile journey walking backwards. That’s it. I can see what has happened, but I cannot see what is coming. I can see the faces of my characters, and I can see the details of the world, but I’m always a second behind them. And I never know where I’m going. This is problematic, of course, because there are stones in the path. And there are deep pits. And bramble patches. And wild, hungry animals.

When one has taken a thousand mile journey backward, entering back into it is a bit daunting. Because you only know the backside of landmarks. You don’t necessarily know how to begin. And you have no map.

Editors, in their souls, are cartographers. They send us detailed analyses of the worlds we built – they create lexicographies and explanations and theories of a world that is not of their making – but one that they inhabit all the same. They allow themselves the birds-eye view and painstakingly chart the course that the author has taken, points out the areas of stumble and groan, points out the trails that may not be marked along the way, but that provide firmer footing and possibly-breathtaking views.

They cannot walk with us as we make the journey again. They know the road is long, and dangerous. They know we will get lost in the dark. They know we will be, from time to time, beset by thieves. And they cannot hold our hands.

But they can give us a map. Mine is nine pages, single spaced. I clutch it to my chest. It is both mirror and lamp, both guide and memoir, both projection and rumination. I treasure it. And I journey forward.

And that is what I’ll be doing over the next month. That and the side projects. How about you?

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Algonquin Books for Young Readers, books, fiction, the writing process