Adventures in New York: Tales of Blizzards, Russian Novels, Emily Dickinson, and a Writing Conference with 1200 of My Closest Friends

Day One: I'm here a night early because a snowstorm's coming and my airline suggests that I go, so I do, fortunate to have a place to stay, an apartment way uptown with a friend. I'm a grown-up in the cab, feeling sophisticated as I give the driver the address. Feeling less sophisticated when I apparently commit a major faux pas and don't tip him enough? Because he drops me at the curb and doesn't get out to help me haul my suitcase and when I try to close the cab trunk it whacks me in the head.

Day Two: Outside's a blizzard. My friend is not feeling well, but she's a trooper, walking me to the subway station seven blocks away. We laugh in the fierce wind, clomping up snowy sidewalks, me dragging my wheeled suitcase, the only two dodos out walking except for a guy here and there shoveling a store front. At the subway station, I'm snowy-melty-wet and sweating, lugging my dripping suitcase, working on feeling sophisticated as I ride 110 blocks downtown, change trains, and ride into Grand Central, find my hotel, miraculously, inside the terminal building, heave my drippy suitcase into the lobby, realizing with horror that my ID is in my suitcase and I will have to open it, in the lobby, in order to check in.

Meet my roommate and her friend, who has never been to NYC and wants to see the Empire State Building, and the blizzard's over and the sidewalk shovelers are amazingly efficient and I offer to take her there.

We promptly get lost. And I step off a curb directly into an icy slush puddle and soak my sneakers through. Then I walk ten blocks, feet tingling and frozen, chatting, while stressing over the state of my skin and wondering how long it takes for frostbite to set in.

No worries! I find a corner tourist-y store and buy a ten dollar pair of I Love New York socks. (Best ten bucks I ever spent in my life.)

Did I mention I'm here for a writing conference? It's the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators annual Winter Conference! And I am the Regional Advisor of the Ohio Central South region and they're paying my way! Woot! All of the RAs walk to Broadway and see a play I've never heard of, Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812, which I learn later is a story taken from War and Peace, and I love it. (Favorite song: "In 19th Century Russia We Write Letters.") Walk home in the cold, clinging to a new friend as we step over frozen curbs and try not to fall and/or soak ourselves.

Day Three: I have no boots, but damn it, this will not keep me from walking eight blocks to the Morgan Library to see an Emily Dickinson exhibit! Fun facts: Emily D had red hair. Also, she treated books even more disrespectfully than I do-- not merely content to fold pages and scrawl all over the margins, but also cutting words out and gluing them onto other pages.

I am a brave subway rider, finding the correct route and taking it down to the Lower East Side to see the Tenement Museum, getting lost only once and so very careful not to step off a street into an ice puddle.

I meet a friend for a drink in the hotel, which turns into two drinks and I've eaten nothing since breakfast and I go tipsily to party with fellow RAs and editors and agents and gorge myself at the mashed potato bar and bump into an agent who rejected me once and I think I tell her that I love her?

Day Four: Crack of dawn and I am at my station, registering people for the conference and pointing out the women's restroom and the coat check. Laughing when Lin Oliver, the SCBWI co-founder, tells us jokes and holding back tears when the brilliant Bryan Collier speaks about seeing himself for the first time in a book, A Snowy Day, and how he thinks of that little boy Peter when he makes his art.

The world is waiting for you to dream, he says. The kids are waiting for you. 

Later I do cry as beloved/best-selling author Tahereh Mafi speaks of the experiences of her immigrant parents from Iran and shares her long writing and publishing journey.

I am the lucky RA chosen to help Tahereh later with her book-signing, which basically involves handing the fans post-it notes to write out their names and holding their books open so Tahereh can autograph easily. She speaks with each person and I watch them walk away clutching their books, blinking back tears.

And then it is time for another party! And more mashed potato bar! I mingle with my regional members and drink a 17 dollar glass of wine.

Which leads to another party for new members and I realize that once, long ago, I was a new member and had no clue about writing or publishing and look at me now, a much older veteran in the trenches with achy (yet thankfully, warm/dry) feet.

Day Five: I ride in an elevator with Jane Yolen and then I hear her speak. Tomie De Paola presents an award to a worthy up-and-coming illustrator. Publishers and agents talk about the state of the business. Cynthia Leitich-Smith and Ellen Hopkins discuss difficult topics in kids books and how to write about our changing, diverse world. They remind us that this year 50.2% of all babies born in America were not white and we, as children's writers, are on the forefront of acknowledging and embracing all of our readers.

Sara Pennypacker gives the closing address and she is glorious, reminding us why we write and why our stories matter.

We write to allow children to experience safely dangerous situations. 

Our job is to give children a voice in a world where they rarely have one.  
She tells us to find our tribe, to surround ourselves with other creators, to reflect life and to model life.

I must sneak out of the room before she's finished to take my place at my next station, by the side of Andrea Beatty, author of the bestselling Ada Twist, Scientist. Andrea's line snakes around the room and the organizers whisper to me to move it along, but I can't bear to. Andrea is so funny and personable, chatting with each fan, scrawling her name and writing Be Bold! on each book.

I pour her water and snap photos of her posing with her fans. "In April I'm marching for science," she tells me during a rare lull, and then two children walk up with their harried mom. The girls are holding books, heads bowed, reading. They shyly lower the books and Andrea chats enthusiastically, flipping through the pages, pointing out the secret hidden illustrations.

Off to the airport with my roommate, now a dear friend. We eat a twenty dollar airport meal and share photos of our kids and pets and gardens. Our flights are delayed and we commiserate about the world and vow to keep in touch.

Much later I settle into my cramped seat on the plane, open the book I am reading, fall into the world of the story as the plane takes off and the lights of the city fade away.

In Which I Confess My Love for Emily Dickinson. Plus: a Shout Out to a Great New Book

I'm ashamed to admit that once upon a time I didn't think much of Emily Dickinson.

When I was in high school, I may have glanced at a poem or two. They seemed like sappy things about nature or unrequited love. Bluh is what I thought. And that mousy author photo, the one they always stick in English textbooks-- bluh to that too.

Poor Emily. What a sad little mousy waif.

Fun fact about that photo: Emily hated it. It was taken when she was seventeen and she'd been sick for a few months when she posed for it. She didn't think it represented what she looked like at all. Which is cruddy because that picture was THE only verified photo of her in existence until a second one was rediscovered in 2012:

Look at how healthy and wise ED looks here!

When I was in college I won a creative writing award and was thrilled to accept the prize money--100 bucks, which could buy a lot of Bacardi and cokes back then, but less than thrilled to accept the other prize the English Dept. gave me. A book. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. 

Shameful confession: I complained to my writing professor about this present. Yes. My face is red as I write this. Jeez. I said. Or something along these lines. I get that the stodgy old white male department head wanted to give me something authored by a woman, but did it have to be barfy Emily Dickinson? I mean, come on. Get with the 20th century. Hello. Ever hear of Sylvia Plath?

I thought my cool writing prof would agree. Instead he shocked me by chewing me out. He was one who'd chosen the book, he said. And nothing against Sylvia Plath, but maybe it was time for me to take another look at Emily Dickinson. She was not barfy. In fact he viewed her as one of the two poets, along with Walt Whitman, who'd ushered in the modern poetry era, and if I didn't know that, then maybe he'd failed me as a teacher. 

Yikes.

I read The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. I fell in love. 

Did you know that ED wrote nearly two thousand poems, scrawling them out on bits of paper or including them in letters to friends and family? She never married and in the final twenty years of her life, she dressed only in white and secluded herself in her bedroom, rarely coming downstairs; although she is rumored to have shared gingerbread with neighborhood children by lowering it in a basket from her window...

Sure, her poems on the surface might be about nature or unrequited love, but there's a lot more to those seemingly dashed off lines. Take another look and you'll find stuff that's philosophical and achingly curious and even funny. 

When I taught high school English, I loved talking ED with my students. One thing I held back until the very end of the Emily Dickinson unit is that most of her poems are written in hymn meter, which means that the lines alternate between eight and six syllables. Yeah yeah, whatever, Ms. Casella, my students would say, until I told them that the poems could be sung to the tune of any song written in that meter. 

Example: "Amazing Grace" or the "I Like to Teach the World to Sing" Coca Cola song. 

For extra credit I let the students sing and they always had a grand old time.

Here. Try it for yourselves. 

Because I could not stop for Death--

He kindly stopped for me--

The Carriage held but just Ourselves--

And Immortality...

Or how about this? 

I heard a fly buzz--when I died

The Stillness in the Room

Was like the Stillness in the Air

Between the Heaves of Storm--

Okay. That is enough playtime, class.

Maybe you are wondering why I am thinking about Emily Dickinson today. 

Because I just finished reading the most brilliant and beautiful book, Death, Dickinson, and the Demented Life of Frenchie Garcia by Jenny Torres Sanchez. 

Main Character Frenchie Garcia has recently graduated from high school and she's lost and depressed. She didn't get into the art college of her choice. Her best friend has a new girlfriend and isn't paying Frenchie much attention. She has a morbid hobby: watching funeral processions drive by her house on the way to a nearby cemetery. Sometimes she follows them inside the cemetery and sits by the grave of Emily Dickinson. (This is Orlando, so it's not the real Emily Dickinson's grave, but Frenchie kinda likes the idea that someone named Emily Dickinson is buried there.) 

Frenchie's real problem, though, isn't revealed immediately. It turns out that a few months earlier Andy Cooper, a guy Frenchie secretly crushed on for years, had singled her out to have a "night of adventure," and the next morning he killed himself. 

Now Frenchie's trying to come to grips with what really happened that night, and she's doing it by recreating the adventure with someone else.

There are Emily Dickinson poems sprinkled throughout, but whether you love Emily Dickinson or not, you will surely love this book. 

Fun Times on a Dead Author Vacation

So last week was our daughter's spring break and while many of her friends were cavorting around the sunny beaches of Florida, she was cavorting around museums or traipsing through cemeteries helping us search for dead author tombstones. Yes, this is what passes as a fun family vacation when your mom is a former high school English teacher. Luckily, her father shares my passion for all things American literature/history. He's also a big go-go touristy guy who thinks that lazing about on a beach is a waste of a week when you could spend it instead hitting three cities (Philadelphia, New York, and Boston) and poking around every suggested site in the accompanying guidebooks.

For the most part our daughter was a good sport, trailing after us, her gooby parents, with only a few minor complaints. Snippets from some of our conversations:

Me: Hey! Look! Emerson's grave!
Her: wow.

Dad: Did you see that? It's the white dress Emily Dickinson wore!
Her: Yeah. Cool.

Me: You wanna walk around this pond and find the site of Thoreau's cabin?
Her: Um, not really.
Dad: Come on! It's only a half mile walk! Let's race!
Her: No. Really. I'm fine.

We wore the poor kid out, walking the heck out of the old section of Philadelphia, tromping through most of lower Manhattan, and following the Freedom Trail in Boston. We also explored Amherst, Mass, (home of my beloved Emily Dickinson), Concord (Thoreau! Emerson! Hawthorne! Alcott!), and Salem (a shout out here to our amazing tour guide, Susan, of the Hocus Pocus Night-time Witch Tour. While I'm at it, I should give another shout out to Seamus, our guide on a horse and carriage ride through Central Park. And his horse Marcello. And to Lucy, the ultra cool docent at the Emily Dickinson House.)

Here are some of the fascinating facts those unfortunate beach-going friends missed:

The Declaration of Independence was NOT actually signed by all those signers on July 4, 1776.

Ben Franklin's privy was located only a FEW FEET away from his water supply.

Emily Dickinson dashed off many of her poems in letters to friends and often scratched off words and wrote in alternate word choices. Meaning, these poems weren't as "dashed off" as some people believe...

She had a brother named Austin, who lived next door and sort of looks like a brooding rock star in pictures.

There is a photograph of her that has recently been discovered and is in the process of being verified.

That's probably her, in her late 20's, on the left

Nathaniel Hawthorne was so ashamed of his family's connection to the Salem Witch Trials (an ancestor, John Hathorne, one of the judges) that he added a "w" to his name.

Thoreau's grave is just a small marker that says simply "Henry." Many visitors to the cemetery where he is buried have placed stones, coins, pencils, and pine cones around the grave marker.

You can visit the site of his cabin and leave a stone (or rock) there too. And after, you can stop by the Thoreau Gift Shop and buy a T-shirt or a coffee mug that says: Simplify, Simplify on it. (For those in the know, the actual quote is Simplify, Simplify, Simplify, but apparently that didn't look as simplified to the T-shirt creators.)

The woman who wrote The Five Little Peppers (Margaret Sidney) and the author of Little Women (Louisa May Alcott) are buried right around the bend from Thoreau. Emerson is across the path. Meville is NOT buried in this cemetery, but some guy named Melvin is--which we discovered after circling around for an hour and getting briefly lost).

If you hike the Freedom Trail in Boston, you'll see the Old North Church, Paul Revere's house, the site of the first public school in America, and a cemetery where the British used tombstones for target practice.

Also, there are several Starbucks.

And an Urban Outfitters.

Beat that, beach-goers.

The teen as a four year old, ticked off in Paul Revere's garden, during a previous, fun, literary-themed vacation.

Real Writers Drive Carpool

I love meeting other writers.

When I was growing up I didn’t know any “real” ones, so when my teenage self dreamed of someday being a published author, the goal was as farfetched and absurd as announcing I wanted to go to the moon. In college my awareness of working writers expanded, but only in a small way. My writing professors were brilliant, cool, creative people, but they only presented one pathway: poet slash teacher.

I guess it comes as no surprise that when I graduated, I started an MFA program in poetry. I had this vision of myself living in a funky house with an Emily Dickinson-style turret, teaching hippy and/or goth kids by day, scribbling poems and sending them off to obscure literary journals by night. I would own several cats and grow old, alone, in my funky turret, eating gingerbread brought to me by the timid children in the neighborhood who had heard stories of the wacky poet lady.

Yeah. I was a weird dreamer back then. At the end of my first year in grad school several realizations hit me at once:

1. I probably wasn’t intellectual enough to be a college professor.

2. Not many people really read those literary journals. (Sad but true)

3. I like the idea of gingerbread more than the reality of it.

4. Ditto on multiple cat ownership

5. I fell in love with a sweet and smart and stable man, and I gladly gave up turret-living for a house in the suburbs. I also gave up, for a while, the dream of being a writer. Because it seemed like kind of a childish dream. And because I didn’t know any writers who were also driving carpool.

The next decade of my life was all about parenting and teaching and attending PTA meetings and cheering for soccer teams and cleaning the house, but there was also this naggy little part of me that I couldn’t stamp out, and that part kept scribbling away—when the kids were napping, and later when they were at school or piano lessons or sports practices. 

I went, slowly and anxiously at first, to workshops and conferences and writing retreats. And was surprised to meet other writers, “real” ones, who also seemed fairly normal. Meaning, they did mundane stuff like go to the grocery store and pay bills and clean toilets. Shockingly: Some of them did not even own a cat.

Anyway, I love to meet writers and pick their brains about their books and their writing process. I grill them at writing functions like I’m an investigative journalist, peppering them with questions while we help ourselves to coffee and bagels (writing workshops are big on coffee and bagels):

Where do they get their ideas? Are they make-stuff-up-as-they-go types or outline ahead/planning people? What kind of work schedule do they have every day? How do they balance their writing time with their other obligations? How many books did they write before they got their first book deal? How many rejections did they get along the way?

And now more and more I am asking people how they promote their books and how they use social media and what are their opinions on self-publishing.

The answers are always interesting. Which got me thinking that those answers might be interesting for my blog readers, too. So I’m going to do that—officially interview some of my best writing friends over the next few months and share their insights with you.

Something I learned over the years is that it’s nice to have role models for a life that can seem mysterious and out of reach. Also, there isn’t any one right way to write or live this kind of life. But here’s the most important thing (and something I wish I knew long ago): wanting to be a writer is not silly and it’s not a childish dream. If you stick with it, I’m here to tell you, it’s hard—really hard—but probably not as hard as going to the moon.

(Emily Dickinson's house)

(the moon)

The Life You Save May Be Your Own

Okay. Let’s say you’ve been writing seriously for six years (and half-seriously for ten more). You set a word count every day, and you hit it. You read books in your spare time (because you love to and not just because it’s market research). You joined your professional organization and attend regional and sometimes national conferences. You’ve studied the business. You send your work out to editors and take their feedback seriously. You snagged an agent, which didn't pan out, and you’re geared up to find new representation. In the meantime you’re keeping a brave face and writing every day. You love writing and you want to continue to write. But some days, you’re discouraged. Beaten down. Weary.

Well, my weary friend, if this is YOU, I think I may have an answer to your troubles.

It’s starts with the zen-like acceptance that writing is what you DO. It’s not about money or fame or published books lined up on the shelves. Even if you have all of that, even if you’re Stephen King or JK Rowling—in the end, it’s just YOU, ALONE, every day, facing the blank blaring page on your computer screen, plugging away as the words alternately roll out or bleed from your fingertips. Accept that fact, and you’re halfway there.

There’s an interesting character in Camus’ existential novel The Plague. If you haven’t read this book, it’s about a town that is quarantined because of a plague. The townspeople are stuck inside the guarded walls, dealing with people dying around them and trying to figure out what to do as they wait to succumb to the plague too. They come to terms with this reality in their own ways. The doctor decides that it is his duty to care for the sick. The priest offers spiritual help. Teachers continue to teach and shopkeepers continue to sell. See, it’s all a big metaphor about life in general. We’re the townspeople, living our lives inside the metaphorical walls of the earth. We’re all eventually going to die so what do we do while we wait? Do we go nuts? Do we hurt others in our fear? Do we kill ourselves under the strain? Or do we simply go about our business, doctoring and preaching and teaching? Or in the case of my favorite character, a guy named Grand, do we write?

Grand seems like he’s been plopped into the narrative to provide comic relief. He enters the scene every once in a while, consumed with a novel he is writing. The other characters treat him with amusement, asking him politely how his book is progressing. The funny part is that Grand doesn’t seem to be able to get past the first sentence. “One fine morning in the month of May an elegant young horsewoman might have been seen riding a handsome sorrel mare along the flowery avenues of the Bois de Boulogne.” Each time we meet him he’s changed a word. Should it be the month of May or June? Should the horsewoman be elegant? Should the flowers bestrewn? He keeps working on the sentence. His dream is to finish the entire novel. He imagines that when he finally does, all the gentlemen will praise him and cry “Hats off!”

But at the end of The Plague he is still fiddling around with the sentence. He’s probably never going to finish the novel. No gentlemen are ever going to cheer “Hats off!” and yet Grand is strangely content. He’s decided to cut out all of the adjectives and he’s eager to rush home and get to work. It’s what he does. It’s how he spends his life. I don’t know what Camus meant exactly with his construction of Grand. I suppose you could see the guy as deluded and silly. A perfectionist who will never move onto Sentence Two. A person who could do so many more important things with his time on this earth. But Camus was a writer, in addition to being an existentialist philosopher, and so I would like to believe that he sympathizes with Grand. Not everyone is a doctor or teacher. Some of us happen to enjoy fiddling around with words. And if we can amuse other people in the process, all the better.

Other writers have made their peace with writing for the sake of writing. Emily Dickinson wrote the majority of her poems alone in her attic room. Only a handful were ever published when she was alive and those were edited heavily and published anonymously. “This is my letter to the World/That never wrote to Me—” is the beginning of one of her one thousand seven hundred seventy five poems. Herman Melville toiled alone too. He had achieved success with several of his earlier books, but his masterpiece Moby Dick was ignored. He said he didn’t care. He wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne (to whom he dedicated the novel) “For not one man in five cycles, who is wise, will expect appreciative recognition from his fellows, or any one of them.”

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re NOT Emily Dickinson or Herman Melville. They were brilliant writers, who tragically were not recognized as such while they were alive, but their words and ideas will live on as long as there are people to read them.

Here’s the sticking point of the zen-like acceptance theory: It works only partly. It may keep you writing every day, but you're not going to feel very good about it when you suspect that people won't read that writing. Writers and readers, we need each other. Don’t let Emily Dickinson’s hermit-like status in her garret bedroom fool you. She wrote tons of letters and many of her letters were poems. There were a few people out there in the world, people she cared about, who read her work and supported what she was doing. Melville, too. In that same letter to Hawthorne where he said he didn’t care if people liked his book or not, he said he hopedHawthorne would like it.

I understand, weary writer. I truly do. You don’t want money or fame. You only want to be published so you can have readers, others out there who’ll get what you’re writing, who’ll getyou. Every one of us has a story to tell. And every one of us wants to be listened to and understood. Some of us just happen to be little more obsessive about getting that story onto the page.

This seems like a digression, but bear with me. I read a great book yesterday by Sara Zarr, How To Save a Life. (pub Little Brown, Jan. 2012) The narrative goes back and forth between two girls, who on the surface couldn’t be more different. Jill, still reeling from the loss of her father the year before, is lashing out at everyone, particularly her mother, who has made some questionable decisions lately. And Mandy, who is pregnant and has come to live with Jill after Jill’s mother promises to adopt Mandy’s baby. The book seems like it might tread into predictable territory—two girls realize they have more common, etc. But it doesn’t. There’s a real tension here. It doesn’t come from outside, where the reader wonders what’s going to happen to the characters. It comes from the characters themselves. What are they going to do to mess things up? I stayed up late reading, worrying over these girls as if they were my friends.

I loved this book. I’ve read all of Sara Zarr’s books and loved them too. They’re filled with flawed, vulnerable, yet still somehow hopeful/doing-the-best-they-can people. I imagine Zarr writing them somewhere alone—in a nicely appointed office or maybe at a local coffee shop—just her and her lap top. All the while she’s doubting. She’s wondering if what’s she doing is silly and pointless and stupid. When she reaches the final page of her manuscript, she’s fighting off tears and grinning like a fool. Okay, maybe she did win the National Book Award for one of her previous books, but this new one, How to Save A Life, which isn’t even out yet officially, is still untested.

I’d like to put her mind at ease. Hats off, Sara. It’s good. Thank you for writing it. You’re right. Sometimes we save our own lives by saving others.

Weary writer, THIS is why you write. You only need to connect with one other person to make it all worthwhile.

PS. Yesterday you came across a witty tweet: THE ONLY WRITING ADVICE YOU REALLY NEED. And when you clicked on the link it said:
Keep Writing.

Haha. But you knew that already. Now go do it.