I got an e-mail recently from a seventy-year-old woman. She said, “your writing fed my soul.” I was so touched by her words. I also had this funny sense of both knowing and not knowing what she meant. I hope that we all have had at some point in our lives the sensation of having our soul nourished by a work of fiction. How it happens or when it happens is all kind of magical. Nor, in my experience, is there a particular kind of book that triggers this peculiar satisfaction. I say “peculiar” because unlike eating real food, this food is a funny mixture of contentment and yearning. Paradoxically, it “feeds” by awakening a kind of aspiration that is and is not like hunger. Sometimes I wonder whether an author can consciously write for the reader’s soul. There may be authors out there who can, but they play with fire. I’m sticking to the Zen archer’s humble rule: aim to the side and let the target hit the arrow, if it wants to. And then there is this disturbing question: is there any relationship between writing FOR the soul and writing FROM the soul? That, after all, seems somewhat more within the author’s control. I once wrote a book pretending I had sixty or so days to live. That little exercise in existential visualization took me to a place I’ve never been before. I was, among other things, surprised to find so much humor there. Flannery O’Connor says that every author has a bone to which they return again and again to gnaw and gnaw. The image assumes that we have found our bone or at least know where to look for it. To write from the soul is to gnaw at and be gnawed by the bone of your ultimate concern.You cruelly burden your poor characters with your question and then trail behind them as they struggle for some kind of answer. You’re the gold miner and your characters are your pick and shovel. Nor is the soul purely a place of darkness and dirt. If you’re writing from there you’re still sitting outside in the reception area. Nor does writing from the soul make this endeavor any less a simple task, a craft, the job and duty that must be meekly done. Still, you’re in the bowels digging or in the heights welding. A certain courage is required.
November 27, 2011
November 24, 2011
Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award Speech
This is the acceptance speech I gave at the NCTE/ALAN conference two days ago upon receiving the Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award. I should say that this is the speech I planned to give since in the actual delivery of it, I got a little rattled and choked up and left out or added words here and there.
Thirty six years ago a couple of months from the end of my senior year at Spring Hill College, a small Jesuit institution in Mobile Alabama. I got a letter informing me that the Danforth Fellowship had been awarded to forty-five college seniors out of five thousand or so applicants. The letter went on to tell me that I was number forty-six. I stared at the letter for a few moments. I sighed. The letter seemed to fit perfectly with the story of my life. The fellowship, which covered tuition and living expenses for four years of graduate studies to seniors who intended to go into college teaching after obtaining a Ph.D., was one of the most coveted and prestigious national scholarships. The recipients could take their money and pretty much go wherever they wanted. I had sent in a last minute application at the insistence of David Sauer my English professor and creative writing mentor after I confessed to him that I had no idea what I was going to do after graduation. “You can learn to write in graduate school,” David advised.
A week later another letter from the Danforth Fellowship informed me that one of the forty-five had decided to accept a Fullbright Fellowship instead. I don’t know who that fellow was or where he is now, but every once in a while when I list the many blessings in my life his anonymous name comes up.
I also sometimes find myself reviewing those moments when a life changing, life-directing choice was made. Four years or so after the receipt of those letters, I wrote a very painful letter to the Director of the Danforth Fellowship informing him that I was leaving Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences to attend Columbia Law School. Somehow or other, I wrote in the letter, I would find a way to fulfill the commitment to teach.
Well twenty-five years of practicing law went by and then one day I found myself writing a book about a young man growing in the projects of El Paso. I was writing the book so that my then teenage children could see a side of life that they had never seen before. But it occurred to me as I was writing it that I was, in my own way, teaching and that maybe I had found a path to fulfilling that long ago promise to the Danforth Fellowship.
I mention this episode of my life because I wanted to give you some context to how touched I am at receiving this award. And my appreciation comes not just from the fact that a book about a friendship between a young man set on revenge and a young man with cancer was deemed to contain a “positive approach to life.” It is based also on the fact that this award was picked by a group of people with a commitment to teach. This recognition by teachers and librarians means so much to me because I would like to think that this group recognized in my book values that are worth teaching.
It’s not really cool for a writer of young adult literature to confess that his books are motivated at least partly by an intention to teach. Such a confession creates horrible images of pedantic, preachy, boring books. I think that one of the reasons authors are so reluctant to admit to a “teaching” intention is because they have forgotten about the best teachers in their lives.
As I read the books of my fellow finalists in anticipation of this conference I was amazed at the fast, page-turning, pace of their books. I found all kinds of humor: Laugh out loud humor, dry, subtle humor, humor that suddenly revealed unexpected depth. I also found in these books the presence of the teacher, a good teacher, the kind of teacher that, if we are fortunate, we have had at least once in our lives. The teacher who not only conveys information but who elicits insight, the teacher who not only answer our questions but who confronts us with mystery, the teacher who makes us think and makes us feel. And indeed, when I read their bios, I saw how the important part that teaching played and in some cases still plays in their lives. If you haven’t read their books, read them and see if you can find the good, the wise, the kind, the invisible teacher and maybe you will agree with me that maybe, just maybe, in picking these books, the Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award Committee decided to send a powerful, important message.
So thank you Jordan, Matt, Matthew, Kristen for your effort. I look forward to continuing to learn from you. Thank you Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic for publishing the kind of books I like to write, I need to write, I’m called to write. Thank you Cheryl Klein, my dear editor for helping me to discover what I truly want to say and the most interesting way to say it. Thank you, Jill, my wife, whose example of good teaching I see every day. And thank you Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award Committee for recognizing the teacher in me.
