But today’s fifth graders are beautiful. They sit there and look at me skeptically as I come in. They’ve been told, you see, that I’m a famous author and they should be grateful I’m there. Well, their faces say as I look back at them, they’ll be the judge of whether to be grateful or not. I don’t look famous. Pretty soon, after I’ve been there a few minutes, they relax. I’m only a person who makes stories and pictures. They do that, too. The skepticism disappears, and soon we are just talking to each other. They are open, honest, and direct. They laugh easily, but they are not silly. We talk about the Loch Ness monster, about magic water and what an ancient idea that is, about why movies are so often terrible, about pets, theirs and mine—a whole wide range of things. They tell me how boring and confusing the beginning of Tuck Everlasting is, and then we talk about what time might look like if you could draw a picture of it. They are wonderful. I know, watching them and listening to them, that in a matter of months they won’t be wise and calm anymore, or even half so beautiful. They will turn into hormone machines, as we all did in our turn, and for a few years they will forget how to be open and direct. But for now they are full of imagination; they are radiant; they are luminous; they enlighten. They are, themselves, beacons. They don’t know these things about themselves, so I try to tell them. But once again they look skeptical. If the magic water were real, they tell me, they wouldn’t drink it now. They wouldn’t want to be ten years old forever. Well, of course not. But I’m lucky. I can, and do, go back to the same classrooms year after year, and they are always full to the brim with the same enduring light.
So this is the light that matters. This is why we do the work we do, all of us. We will go on doing it the very best we can, whether we are the necessary ones or only the crazy, expendable ones. I only hope that we, the writers and illustrators, will stop congratulating ourselves, for the miracle doesn’t reside in us at all. I don’t want to put down what I and my immediate colleagues do. There are always genuine moments of inspiration, and of those we can all stand in awe. It’s just that I think the makers of stories and pictures have been in the limelight too long. There are a lot of very good writers and illustrators working hard in our field, and what they do is important, but the part that’s important is not our own books and art. It is the gift of a love of books and art in general. The gift won’t be accepted by all children, not even by a majority. But if a child learns to love books and art while he’s in elementary school, chances are he’ll love them all his life. And oh, what a privilege that is! To know you have helped to prepare the way for Charles Dickens, for Herman Melville, for Jane Austen, for any of the great writers for adults. And for all the painters from Michelangelo to Georgia O’Keeffe. But, you see, the people who make the stories and pictures for children are only a small part of the number laboring toward that end. We have the publicity departments behind us, we get the prizes, we get all the attention; but that is misleading and unjustified.
My fifth-grade teacher’s name was Mrs. Wilson. I have remembered her with love for fifty years: what she looked like, how she sounded, what she did for me. But except for the children’s classics that were read aloud to me, I remember very few of the books I took home from the library every week, or the names of their authors and illustrators. All I remember is how much fun it was to go to the library and take out the books and read them.
Acts of light were performed every day by Mrs. Wilson and my librarian. We take those acts of light for granted, like the daily rising of the sun. But this is a mistake. We should never take them for granted because without them we couldn’t see to read. There is a disagreeable old saying that goes, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” I would like to correct that old saying, which is long overdue for a rewrite. Let it read: “Those who can, teach. Those who can’t, be grateful for those who can.”
Illustration from Kneeknock Rise, winner of a Newbery Honor in 1971
“Writing about the characters we choose can be a way of re-designing ourselves, if only in our imaginations.”
Finding Paths
(1999)
I’ve been thinking about what it might mean to be a pathfinder. And after a lot of pondering, I’ve come to the conclusion that I myself seem to have tried as hard as I could not to find any paths. What I’ve done is try—though without much success—to cling to paths I already have. But the characters in my stories do seem to seek out new paths. Or maybe they don’t; maybe it only looks as if they did. It’s time to try to make some sense of this by comparing my own experiences with theirs.
The world I grew up in was very different from the world as it is today. The year I was born, 1932, was a uniquely scary time. The economy had fallen apart completely, and hundreds of thousands of people, including my father, lost their jobs. Some of them lost their hopes, too, and jumped off bridges or out the windows of tall buildings. My father didn’t do that, thank goodness. He had too strong a sense of humor. But my family, which consisted pretty much only of my parents, my older sister, and me, did do something that I can only suppose was a common thing to do at the time: We drew together into a tight little unit and took a stand, us against the world. My father assumed that everything would eventually be all right.
My mother, who was as strong and determined as a corporate CEO, didn’t assume anything; instead, she reached out to protect us all. My sister has said since that when she was little she used to think of our mother as a stone wall with two blue marbles in it, the marbles, of course, being our mother’s eyes.
In the thirties, I was too little to know exactly what was going on. And I wasn’t told, either. But at all ages you sense things. Even as a preschooler, I sensed danger in the world. If you know you’re being protected, you’re naturally going to assume that there’s something out there to be protected from. At least, that’s what I assumed. So I wasn’t quite as genuinely defiant as my more sensible sister. I could pretend a pretty good defiance if my mother was there to back me up, but I wasn’t very good at it otherwise. And my mother, who liked being in control anyway, was happy to have me stay dependent on her.
Near the beginning of Tuck Everlasting, Winnie Foster thinks about running away, but soon decides against it. Here are a few lines from that part:
“Where would I go, anyway?” she asked herself. “There’s nowhere else I really want to be.” But in another part of her head, the dark part where her oldest fears were housed, she knew there was another sort of reason for staying at home: she was afraid to go away alone.
It was one thing to talk about being by yourself, doing important things, but quite another when the opportunity arose. The characters in the stories she read always seemed to go off without a thought or care, but in real life—well, the world was a dangerous place. People were always telling her so. And she would not be able to manage without protection. They were always telling her that, too. No one ever said precisely what it was that she would not be able to manage. But she did not need to ask. Her own imagination supplied the horrors.
When I go to schools to talk to the kids who’ve been reading my stories, they often ask where my characters come from, and I tell them that all main characters tend to be like the person who wrote the story, because the main character’s eyes are the eyes through which the events of the story are seen. I tell them that Winnie Foster is a lot like me. But I add that she’s braver than I am, and the example I give is that I’ve never picked up a toad and don’t intend to start now. They think that’s funny, and of course it is, in its way. Also, it’s true. I never have picked up a toad. However, Winnie Foster is braver than I am in ways that are much more important than that. Winnie is afraid in the beginning, but in the first of the short few days that the story takes to spin itself out, she tries to defy that fear, and takes the first steps toward overcoming it when she goes into the wood early the next morning.
But I would never have gone into the wood. I would have stayed home where it was safe. Life forces us sometimes to take risks, but the ri
sks taken by the person who doesn’t want to take them are very different from the risks taken by a pathfinder.
I could whine that my fearfulness was and is all my mother’s fault, my mother and the Depression. But my sister was never full of fears, even with the same mother. And as for the Depression, well, I have a friend who lives in New Orleans who is exactly the same age I am, so she went through the Depression, too. Many parts of her life and her reactions to them are exactly like mine. We are both from small towns in the Midwest, our husbands have many things in common, and so do our children and our dogs. We are a lot alike. But a few years ago, Joan decided it was time to wrench herself away from her very demanding family for a couple of weeks. She signed up to be an aide in a research program on orangutans, and went gaily off to Borneo without a backward look. The only thing she was worried about was snakes. There are a lot of snakes in Borneo. But she went anyway.
Nothing—nothing—could get me to go to Borneo. I don’t even want to go to Akron. This is not because of snakes or automobile tires. It is because, like Winnie Foster at the beginning of her story, I am afraid to go away alone. I often have gone away alone, on gigs having to do with children’s books, to remote places all around this country, from northernmost Montana to central Arkansas, and from seacoast California to seacoast Florida. I did it because I was told that I had to. But I never got over being afraid: not of the gig itself, but of being far from home and alone.
Thinking about this in connection with pathfinding has made me wonder, though, about the motivations of writers. An idea for a story comes out of nowhere and presents itself to the front of your brain, and you get excited about it, and then you settle back and become a craftsman, and work out the plot and the casting of characters, and proceed to tell the story the very best way you can. Nobody has to remind you that something has to happen in a story, that a problem has to be there for the hero to face and solve. At least, in a story for children the problem has to be solved. You will long since have learned to be objective about what you’re doing. You don’t go breathlessly along in some kind of haze of love for the initial idea and your cleverness in having thought of it. So most of the time you don’t search out the origins of that initial idea. What does it matter where it came from? Well, actually, it doesn’t matter where it came from. But you see, I have a son who’s a psychologist, and—well, let me back up just a bit. You may not be familiar with a little picture book of mine called Nellie: A Cat on Her Own. The jacket flap, which I had to write myself, says:
Nellie is a marionette, but she is also a cat—a cat marionette who loves to dance. When she is left on her own by the clever old woman who made her, she believes that her dancing is over forever, but her friend, Big Tom—a real cat, with fur—takes her away with him to a moonlit hilltop where there is a gathering of friends. What happens then may be moonshine or magic, or possibly both.
This appears to be a pretty simple story. I didn’t think much about where the idea came from; it didn’t seem to matter. But I sent a copy to my son, who usually keeps his analyzing at a healthy distance from the family. This time, however, when he called me to thank me for the book, he said, “Mom, you know—there’s a whole lot going on here.” So I went back and looked at the story again from his perspective, and was naïve enough to be astonished. Well, gee whiz! Nellie is, in fact, a mini-autobiography! A mini-autobiography with an idealized ending, yes, but a mini-autobiography just the same.
I’ve talked about this with writing colleagues and they all confess to discovering the same kind of thing in their own stories. It comes as no surprise to anyone but us, of course. Everyone except the writer knows that any piece of fiction is going to be full of the psyche of the person who wrote it. But the point is not that I wrote a story about a character who is left alone in a dangerous world. The point is that the character takes charge as well as she can, makes a choice, and builds a life from the available ingredients. In other words, stories can move beyond autobiography into a kind of therapy. Writing about the characters we choose can be a way of redesigning ourselves, if only in our imaginations. Because, you see, if I had really been Nellie, taken away to dance in the moonlight by the real cat, Big Tom, I would have enjoyed it as long as I could dance with him, but the next day, no way would I have stayed behind in a hollow tree the way Nellie does. I would have taken Big Tom up on his offer to find me a new old woman to take care of me. And what kind of a story would that have made of it? Not too satisfying.
And yet, pathfinders come in a lot of different shapes and sizes. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy is never a coward. She faces up to trial after trial. But first and foremost, she is always trying to find a way to go home to Kansas. In other words, she may be finding paths she wouldn’t necessarily have chosen to find. However, the going home is an important ingredient of the path of the classic hero: You have to go home at the end of your adventures. I doubt that L. Frank Baum knew anything on a conscious level about the path of the classic hero, but Joseph Campbell, in his Hero with a Thousand Faces, claims that we all know the pattern subconsciously.
But it’s a pattern. It doesn’t necessarily mirror real life. Let me tell you a little about my ancestors, the ones from whom my father’s mother was descended. Their name was Zane, and they came over here from England before the Revolution. They hurried out to the frontier, which was then more or less in Ohio, and literally made a path which was afterward called Zane’s Trace, a path that angled down southwest across a piece of Ohio and was used for a while by other pioneers. And then they fought in the Revolution. And then—and then—nothing! No more paths. The frontier moved on past Ohio, ever westward; new pioneers hurried by on Lake Erie or on the Ohio River. But the Zanes stayed where they were and did nothing of interest ever again, and this definitely includes my father’s mother. Ohio itself isn’t interesting anymore. Hasn’t been interesting for a couple of centuries. I sometimes feel that my ancestors bear some part of the blame for that fact, but it’s too late now to do anything about it.
Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that there is nothing in my life that bears any resemblance to the finding of paths, either literally or figuratively. On the contrary. So how has this fact influenced the stories I’ve written? I guess my stories are, at bottom, not built around adventures at all, but rather around ideas. Well, I don’t guess; I know. Ideas are the real protagonists. Nice, comfortable ideas you can carry around without leaving the house. Things happen to my characters because there’s no story if nothing happens, but they all go home afterward and never leave again. Winnie Foster in Tuck Everlasting spends the rest of her life in Treegap and is buried there. Just like the Zanes and Ohio. Hercules Feltwright in Goody Hall goes home to Hackston Fen at the end. In Kneeknock Rise, Ada and her family will stay in Instep. Why not? They like it there. Even a cousin like Egan can’t destroy their pleasure in their monster. In The Eyes of the Amaryllis, an irritating visitor says to Jenny’s grandmother, “However have you kept yourself amused in this boring old place?” To which Gran replies, “Why should I leave? This is my home.” And in The Search for Delicious, Gaylen settles down to being mayor of the first town and marries a hometown girl. The minstrel in that story is the only wanderer I’ve ever cast as a character. But I think you feel a little sorry for him somehow, poor homeless nomad. I wrote Delicious in the late sixties, which is not unimportant to the kind of story it is. The minstrel is like many young people in those days, tramping around with guitars, trying to make peace while the world made war.
So my characters have had their adventures, yes, but they’ve always gone home afterward. And it has been the going home I’ve envied them, not their adventures. I’ve moved twenty-nine times, finding new homes on the average once every two and a half years, sometimes down the street and sometimes in a whole new state. That’s what a lot of us do here in America. We move. Nothing unusual about it. I’m different, if at all, only in the fact that the paths I’ve trodden, I’ve mostly trodden kicking and screaming.
It’s possible, of course, that pathfinding means something else. I’ve seen pathfinders described as precursors, pavers of the way who open doors for themselves and others. But you can’t pave ways and open doors without leaving home, or so it seems to me. Leaving home not only physically, but philosophically, too. Is it possible to stay at home physically while you’re leaving philosophically? I’m not sure about that. If it is possible, maybe it’s one of the many reasons why people write stories in the first place.
But I’m not sure about that, either. People like the Brontë sisters seem to have written stories to open up the constrictions of their world. Harriet Beecher Stowe wanted to change society. Some writers want to make money and got the idea from somewhere that writing is easy and will make you rich and famous. Agatha Christie said she wrote to support herself after her husband died. Beatrix Potter stopped writing after she got married. Some seem to write because they enjoy suffering; Leo Tolstoy is reported by his wife to have been so frustrated sometimes with the composition of War and Peace that he literally rolled on the floor and wailed.
I think that on the whole I prefer to believe you can divide all people, writers included, into two groups: those who find paths and those who stay home. Kenneth Grahame understood about this. I think he and I would have gotten along very well, at least on the question of pathfinders and stay-at-homes. There’s a beautiful chapter in The Wind in the Willows entitled “Wayfarers All,” in which the Rat, sitting beside the river, is joined by another rat, a dusty one, says Grahame, who salutes “with a gesture of courtesy” that has “something foreign about it.” This wayfarer turns out to be a self-described seafaring rat whose preferred habitat is in the captain’s cabins of ships in the coasting trade. He is a hugely articulate wayfarer who woos the imagination of Ratty with long, rich descriptions of days and nights on the water, and days and nights in foreign ports. Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, all are familiar to him, and so are Lisbon, Oporto, and Bordeaux, Cornwall and Devon, and the seacoast towns of Spain. “Spell-bound and quivering with excitement,” Grahame tells us,
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