A SAGA ENDS

     I got a package from Katherine Paterson this week.  As you may recall, she told me in her most recent email that she couldn't answer all my questions right now, but that she'd try to send "something" to me and Michele before leaving for Cuba.  This is what the "something" turned out to be:

     Two copies of her recent memoir (although she says in the book that it's not a memoir; it's just a collection of stories from her life, as per the title).  One copy for me, one for Michele, obviously.  No accompanying note or inscription, but now I'm being greedy, right?  All she signed up for in the first place was giving us tea.  She's not going to answer our specific questions, but, to tell you the truth, I started reading the book yesterday (hence the bookmark in the one on the right), and it does reveal a lot of the things we wondered about.  Not her recipe for scones, but there I go being greedy again!  And so here is where the saga ends.  And I am satisfied. 

LET'S GO METS!!

     My son reminded me today that the last time the Mets were in the World Series was when I last painted his room!

SOME PRE-NEWS, PERHAPS??

     A couple of weeks ago I posted here about my tea with my hero Katherine Paterson - both what a memorable experience it was, and at the same time, how disappointing it was not to be able to talk with her about her work.  What I did not post was the fact that after The Visit, my compadre Michele and I put our heads together, discussed our mutual frustration, and concluded: how could it hurt to send her a list of some of the questions we wished we'd been able to ask while we were there?  The worst she can do is ignore us.  She can't rescind the tea and scones.  So we each compiled a list of our Top Four questions, and I emailed it to KP on September 30th, telling her how honored we were to have met her and how much we would appreciate it if she could take the time to answer any or all of our questions.  I got no response.  I was still glad that Michele and I had taken some initiative, rather than just ineffectually stewing, but it was clear that our intuition had been right - she really DIDN'T want to discuss her books with us!  But we were no worse off than we had been before we tried. 
     And then last night, to my enormous surprise, I got a response to my email.  It consisted of two words and a punctuation mark: "Heaven forfend!"  Well, I thought. The long silence had sent a clear enough message all by itself, had it not?  The expression of horror to top it off seemed fairly unnecessary.  I just sucked it up (because, hello?  THIS IS KATHERINE PATERSON dissing me!!) and answered: "Oh.  Well, we thought it couldn't hurt to ask!  Have a wonderful trip to Havana."  (As I mentioned in my previous post, this intrepid woman is traveling to Cuba for an International Board on Books for Young People conference at the end of this month.)  And that was obviously going to be that.
     This morning she answered me back. "You're right," she said.  And she asked for my mailing address, and said that while she doesn't have enough time right now to answer all our questions, she'll try to get something out to me and Michele before she leaves.
     Stay tuned!!!

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune
Without the words
And never stops at all...

         - Emily Dickinson


We can still hop.

         - note from Lyddie's semi-literate mother, LYDDIE (by Katherine Paterson, of course)

MOONING OVER MARS

     My obsession with space began about ten years ago, when I first had the idea of writing a novel about a girl with an imaginary moon-sister.  The Hom were an advanced race of moon people who spent their lives in a system of underground chambers and tunnels, from where they closely monitored Earth and its inhabitants.  To write about the Hom, I had to read a lot about the moon, and I got hooked.

    
     The problem was that everyone who read my manuscript tried to convince me that the Hom part of the story just didn't belong in, and in fact detracted from, what was otherwise a contemporary realistic YA novel.  For years, I dug my heels in and refused to listen because... the Hom.  Those ten-foot-tall featureless spheres, each one identifiable by its signature color.  Rolling through their tunnels, projecting their own light, unspooling tubes from inside their bodies when arms are needed to perform tasks, or when they want to communicate with other members of their pods.  I know the Hom.  In a way, I am the Hom.
     It's only this year that I finally accepted reality and banished the Hom from the book.  No more Hom.  (Well, not in the book, anyway.  But you can't tell me they're not still out there.)  No more moon-sister.  But my feeling of kinship with the moon hasn't lessened.  Nor has my belief that planetary exploration is absolutely necessary for the human race, because without a doubt there is going to come a time when Earth is going to become overpopulated, or run out of fossil fuels, or we'll find some other way to destroy it (we're already doing a dandy job in that direction).  Or, even without our help, it will experience a natural disaster that will render it either temporarily or permanently uninhabitable, and our descendants are going to need an escape hatch.  A place to go.
     And now Mars has become the Cool Planet.  The next frontier.

And I want to live there. So then the question becomes: why?  I have a nice house right here on Earth, with everything I need right at hand.  Supermarket a mile away, CVS right down the street.  Fresh water flows through pipes directly into my kitchen and bathroom.  I can make the house warm in the winter and cool in the summer without having to know shit about the science involved.  Reliable WIFI.  I even have a generator in the garage in case the power goes out for more than a few hours.  Why would I want to leave?
     And it's not like Mars is hospitable. In fact, pretty much everything about it is inimical to human life.  Liquid water is great and all - it definitely beats NO liquid water - but then you think about transporting a desalinization plant there, and it gets tricky. EVERYTHING is tricky, beginning with mere survival.  But the night after I dragged my husband to see The Martian, I was too excited to sleep.  I couldn't stop thinking about the habitat, the rover, and the sheer Marsness of it all.  (Although, let's face it.  If you were the commander of a Mars crew, waiting anxiously at the end of a tether to catch a  crew member whom you unwittingly abandoned and who's survived alone on the planet for over a year and who is now in uncontrolled bodily flight in your direction - wouldn't you at least put out BOTH hands???  But I digress.)
     Oh, sure, you went to see THE MARTIAN too.  But did you later download NASA's 36-page report entitled "NASA'S JOURNEY TO MARS: Pioneering Next Steps in Space Exploration?"  If you didn't, allow me to recommend it, so that you too can revel in sentences like these: "Current MAV designs require a minimum lander size of just under 20 mt, assuming propellant can be generated from the Martian atmosphere via ISRU."  Those space scientists do love them some acronyms, don't they?
     But I couldn't pinpoint the source of my Martian obsession.  And then I remembered the Swiss Family Robinson.  (Whose name, by the way, wasn't Robinson.  That was for Robinson Crusoe.) How when I was a little girl, all I dreamed about was living like the Swiss Family Robinson, on a previously uninhabited island, having created an adorable treehouse and ingeniously added all the comforts of home, with (conveniently) someone else there to do all the sciencing.
     The images in my head of this idyll were so vivid, but thinking about it over the last few days, I couldn't remember where they came from.  I was pretty sure I'd never read the book, but had there been a movie I saw as a child?
     I looked it up.  The book was originally written in 1812 by a Swiss clergyman with four sons who wanted to teach them the virtues of industry, resourcefulness and self-sufficiency.  So he invented a family with four sons - go figure - that gets shipwrecked on a deserted island, and is fortunately able to rescue barrels and barrels of undamaged supplies from the ship, not to mention all the miraculously unharmed livestock, and they create their own little paradise.  Over the years, the story went the 19th-century equivalent of viral, and was adapted so many times by so many other writers so that it ended up becoming sort of a public-domain fable. 
     And then along came the 1960 Disney film version.

     Seriously, who could not want to live in that treehouse?  Who could not want to have a pet baby elephant in the front yard?  I know I did.  All this, and window curtains too!!

     Looking at those weirdly familiar 55-year-old movie stills, I know for sure that my parents must have taken 5-year-old me to see that movie, and that scenes from it have been forever burned into my brain.  And that is why I now want to go to Mars.  With a lot of scientists.  And a baby elephant in a customized space suit.  And window curtains.
     Obviously, I'm not the only one to have made that connection with space.

     It's actually kind of a no-brainer.  So.  Want to join me on the Red Planet?  But first - how good are you at practical science?  Because I'm a lawyer and a novelist, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to need some help with the tricky parts.

SPEAKING OF BANNED BOOKS, I JUST MET KATHERINE PATERSON

     Yes, that's actually me, sitting next to Katherine Paterson on her couch.  And the connection to Banned Books Week is that two of KP's books, BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA and THE GREAT GILLY HOPKINS, are on the American Library Association's list of the 100 most banned books (past and present) in this country.  KP wears this distinction as a badge of honor.  Full disclosure: I didn't earn the privilege of sitting next to this amazing woman on her couch; I bought it.  I was the highest bidder this spring for the "Tea With Katherine Paterson" prize in an auction sponsored by the Vermont College of Fine Arts, of which she is a board member.  But at least I won fair and square, and didn't have to lie, cheat or steal in order to spend three hours in the company of my writing hero.
     The prize was tea (the meal, not just the beverage) for me and one other person, so I enlisted Michele, my trusty friend and fellow writer, to take a one-night road trip with me from her home on Cape Cod to Montpelier, Vermont, where KP lives.  But KP has only lived in Montpelier (the state capital) for about two years.  Before then she lived with her family in Barre, the next town over, for 29 years - by far the longest she's ever lived in any one place - and Barre is clearly where her heart lies.   Her husband (recently deceased, hence KP's move to smaller living quarters in Montpelier) was a minister at the Barre Presbyterian Church.  The children's room in the Barre Public Library is named after her.
     Barre is a quirky place.  It bills itself as the Granite Capital of the World, and a short walk along the main street will bring you to oddities like a giant granite zipper in the ground

and an outdoor granite chair for your comfort (and ours).

 

     But Michele and I didn't take that little walking tour until the next day, after we spent the night at the wonderful Maplecroft B&B (if you're ever in Barre, make sure you check it out!)  KP Day was the day before, September 18th.  After our tea (which featured homemade scones) and chat, KP took us on a driving tour of Barre, as she had told us she'd like to do.  She pointed out some of the highlights, like this statue of the poet Robert Burns

 

 

and this World War I memorial to fallen soldiers, known locally (as KP gleefully informed us, and for obvious reasons) as Naked Neil:

 

 

     It was a lovely afternoon.  We got to know KP's adorable companion Pixie

 

 

and to spend some time with the very gracious KP herself.

 

 

 

     And yet it's taken me almost two weeks to put together a post about my pilgrimage.   Here's the thing.  I'm torn between feeling awed and grateful at having met KP (and still not quite believing that I really did), and feeling disappointed that the three of us didn't get to talk about her work.  I guess I was expecting that the conversation would flow naturally in that direction, but it never did, and Michele and I discovered afterward that we shared the distinct impression that KP didn't want the conversation to flow the way Michele and I were hoping it would.  That it would have been rude for us to ask questions about her books and her writing career.  In fact, when at one point Michele was brave enough to ask whether KP was planning to write any more novels, I almost gasped.  What if she's offended by the question?  What if she throws us out after we drove all this way? 

      Of course, she didn't throw us out, and if she was offended, she was too polite to show it.  Her answer was basically that she doesn't know whether she can do it without the support of her team.  Her agent has retired; the only editor with whom she's ever worked, Virginia Buckley, has retired; and her husband and biggest supporter is no longer here to cheer her along.

     But the rest of our questions remained unasked.  As Michele later said, she and I were apparently both just too well brought up.  We were taught to follow the host's lead, and that's what we did, especially because the host was one of the most revered and accomplished writers for young people in the world.  But of course, that's also why we wished we could have asked her more questions. 

     So there you have it.   I wish I had more news to share with you, but instead, all I have is these photos and the memory of a once-in-a-lifetime experience.  And I can pass along KP's exhortation for this week:  Celebrate banned books!!  







PLOTTING: WHAT? YOU WERE SERIOUS ABOUT THAT?

                            You don't like this jacket, Your Honor?  I thought you wuz kidding!

     A few weeks ago I had my manuscript critiqued by a very kind and very smart author, and you know what she told me?  That I needed to put more work into plotting!  What the hell?  Just because she asked me what my main character wanted, and what the climax of the story was, and other such annoying questions, and I didn't know the answers to any of them?  SO WHAT?  Didn't she know that because I'm a good writer, and I've created interesting characters, and the book begins at Point A and ends at Point B, I am exempt from the laws of plotting???
     Look.  It's not that I've never heard anyone talk about plotting.  I've attended several million writing conferences and workshops,  I've read one or two million writers' blogs and seen photos of their charts (some color-coded, some not), notebooks, index cards, Post-its, spreadsheets...  I got it, okay?  Some poor souls need to plot out their books.  I, on the other hand, do not.  Because I'm, ya know, gifted, I guess.
     Twenty years of trying to write novels before a tiny glimmer of light finally enters my thick skull.  Yes, I need to know before I write Page One what my main character wants, and pretty soon, she also needs to know what she wants, or nobody will care enough to keep reading about her.  Yes, I need to have the first half of the book lead inexorably toward the midpoint.  Yes, I need to then start gaining speed and tension until I'm barreling toward the climax, after which I can smoke a metaphorical  cigarette and reward myself with the denouement.  YES, YES, YES, OKAY?  I AM NOT SPECIAL.  I AM NOT EXEMPT.  I NEED TO LEARN TO PLOT JUST LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE, OR EVERYTHING I'VE EVER WRITTEN WILL JUST END UP IN A DRAWER ALONG WITH MY HOPES AND DREAMS.
     I was blind, but now I see. 

Which only means that now it's going to be possible for me to make the revisions I need to make.  "Possible" does not rule out "torturous."
     I hear there are people in the world who for some reason don't need to do everything the hard way.  I don't believe it, though, do you? 

ABOUT THOSE VACATION PHOTOS...

Vacation was great.

     We were in Vancouver and then Seattle.  I don't take a lot of photos on vacation so you can't see us in Whistler, a ski resort 2 hours north of Vancouver, ziplining between two mountains.  Yeah we did!!  Nor can you see us attending a Saturday night Bard on the Beach production of Shakespeare's Love's Labor Lost, set in the 1920's with all kinds of Jazz Age choreographed musical numbers thrown in.  It was a hoot!  But here are a few Vancouver shots my husband took:

                            (outside our hotel with some serious eye-rolling by my daughter)

                                         (Shannon Waterfall, just off the road to Whistler)

                                                       (some new friends)

                                                                    (ditto)

                                                           (double ditto)

     Nor do I have photos to display of our Underground Seattle Tour (which seemed to focus heavily on the city's history of sewage disposal) or of our Locked Room Challenge (which was cool, except that I discovered to my deep shame that I'm useless at locked room challenges.  Everyone else in my family did really well though).  I did force my daughter to pose for me at the wonderful Elliot Bay Bookstore

and my husband caught this lovely shot of me and my son at the aquarium gift shop:

But the only time I really pulled my phone out and started snapping pics is when we got to the Chihuly Garden and Museum, because it was absolutely incredible.  First off, I should note that Dale Chihuly, one of the world's foremost glassmakers and a native of Tacoma, is a genius (I think that's beyond question) but is also completely whacked.  This museum/exhibit space of his in Seattle has a café, where we ate lunch, but before you enter the café you walk past two enormous wall-hung exhibit cases displaying a tiny fraction of his collection of bottle openers.  Two cases of bottle openers also hang in each of the nearby bathrooms.  So you start to get a sense of why it might be called the Collections Café, but you don't really get it until you're seated in the restaurant and you look up to the ceiling and see this:

Those are accordions.   Eighty-two of them on the ceiling, our helpful waiter told us.  Less than a fifth of Chihuly's full accordion collection, which he stores at various warehouses.  But if you thought that Chihuly only collects accordions and bottle openers, you were gravely mistaken.  He has MANY other collections, including but not limited to: shaving brushes; pre-WWII string dispensers; mid-20th-century wooden dollhouse furniture; vintage radios; and a category called chalkware, which is so supremely creepy that I had to take two pictures of the huge display cases:

     Okay, so there you have Dale Chihuly the Lunatic Collector.  But there is also Dale Chihuly, the man who single-handedly revolutionized the art of glassmaking, and on this subject, I will just let the photos speak for themselves.

     If you ask me, we could have done nothing else on vacation but seen the Chihuly exhibits, and it would still have been worth the trip.