Transcending as a Verb

Welcome to Utopia. I think there are a good many of you who have been here before. Chautauqua is like that. Wooing people, drawing them to the flower-edged brick walls and its Bestor Plaza with children playing ball and all ages licking ice cream cones. Its bells ring out over Lake Chautauqua, wooing people back again and again. And as you know, our wonderful conference has staked out that special corner of the Chautauqua campus for its own, at least for now.

Welcome today to the territory. It’s yours to savor and have for this day. I’m going to be giving you some post-it notes as I read this talk. Put this one on your mirror wherever you are posted: This territory is mine to savor and have today.

I’m excited to be with you in this enchanted territory. And I want to talk to you writers, experienced and new, young and not only young, about transcending as a verb in writing a book. No, not just a book, a good book. Picture book, nonfiction, novel. A book for children of all sizes and shapes. I know, I know, that word’s a little stuffy. Okay, I have other names for it. “Breaking out” isn’t bad. Hitting a story or a scene out of the ballpark may work for the baseball set.

“Going far enough” always works for me because I can turn that phrase into a question for writers. Have you in that scene or story gone far enough? But transcending, stuffy or not, is really the word I want.

There is some kind of magic in transcending. In this morning, I want you as writers to understand that magic. How on earth did I stumble on this word? I read an absolutely transcendent book, Grace Lin’s Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, which won a runner-up Newbery.

I loved the book, was enchanted by it, but transcended? How? It was transcendent as a story, for starters. Having finished the book, I felt as if I had climbed some very special mountain and walked into some kind of light.

Isn’t that what transcendence means? Climbing into light? But no, it was more than that. Lin’s book transcended accumulatively: the idea for the book, the language and voice she used, the characters she chose, in objects she selected to tell her story, in the place itself, but for me perhaps most of all she transcended in moments, ecstatic moments.

Sometimes scenes, one after another after another, rising with the whole book amounted to something enchanted and enchanting. Let me share one of those moments with you so you’ll begin to understand.

Just for background, Minli lived with her mother and her storytelling father, working hard in the fields by day and listening to her father, Ba, she called him, tell stories about Jad, Jade Dragon and the old man of the moon by night.

“Nonsense,” her discontented mother says, “we’re poor and have only bad fortune and you bother the child with stories.” But believing her father’s magical storytelling, Minli starts out on a journey, determined to find the old man of the moon to see if the wise man can tell her how to change the family’s fortune. Along the way she meets Buffalo Boy who introduces her to a friend. Listen:

Minli was startled when she saw her. Even with the Buffalo Boy blocking most of her view, Minli could see his friend was beautiful, even more beautiful than he had described her. She seemed to glow like a pearl in the and her deep blue silk dress seemed to be the same color as the sky. The bag she held in her graceful hand seemed to be made out of the same silk, but the silver thread embroidering on it made it look as if it were made from a piece of the star scattered sky. Everything about her seemed finer and more delicate than the average person. There was definitely something unusual about the Buffalo Boy’s friend. Ah, glow like a pearl in the moonlight. Deep blue silk the same color as the sky.

“Silver thread and embroidering,” as if were made from a piece of star. Ah, so whole passages transcend, break out, break through. The very words she uses, the rhythm of them transcends simple, concrete, hardly an adjective.

Did you notice? The writer moved that moment so artfully with words too beautiful, so beautiful that the moment moved like life itself to an exquisite point. But let me give you another such moment from Where the Mountain Meets the Moon.

On her way to the inner city, where she is certain she will find the old man in the moon, MinLi meets a beggar in the marketplace, shaking with hunger. She uses a copper coin Buffalo Boy has given to her and buys the largest peach on the stand and hands it to the old beggar. Listen:

In fact, it’s if under a spell the whole crowd stood and watched him, watched him swallow the fruit until he held a peach pit in his hand. Thank you, the beggar said in a much stronger voice. The peach was so delicious. I wish for all of you to be able to taste it. If you would humor an old man and stay a little while, I’ll share my good fortune. The old man took a small stick out of his pocket and bent down in the dirt next to the black brick. He dug a small hole and planted the peach pit. He stuck his stick straight in the little mound and then asked for water. Minli, now completely fascinated, took out her water jug and handed it to him. As he poured water onto the stick, it trembled and was she imagining it? It seemed to grow and it was growing. The stick grew higher and higher and higher and thicker and thicker until it was the width of Minli’s arms when she could no longer see the top of it.

 

Pink flowers and branches began to blossom out of it as the sweet scent of the flowers filled the air. Minli realized the stick had become a peach tree. The crowd of people seemed to realize this too as they all gaped at it open-mouthed, even the stingy vendor left his fruit stand to stare at it in awe. Like pink snow, the petals fell from the tree and made a soft carpet on the dirt. Green leaves sprouted and as they cascaded over the branches, pale moon-colored balls, like pearls developed, almost as if they were small balloons being blown with air.

 

They grew into round fruit, blushing pink and red as they developed. Soon the tree was heavy with them and the air was full of the enchanting smell of ripe peaches. Children gathered around and stared longingly at the luscious fruit while the adults gulped with their mouths watering. And finally the old man reached up, plucked a peach from the tree and handed it to one of the people in the crowd. Please, he said, waving his hand. Help yourself.

 

This is a thoroughly ecstatic moment. The writer using all her senses to bring this moment to life. Touch: soft sweet peach flesh and hearing: groans of delight. Sight: pale moon-colored balls. Active verbs: peach juice dribbling out of his mouth and concrete images: round fruit blushing pink and red.

She gives a simple object–the peach–center stage. Then with her storytelling wand draws her sense-drenched words together into a glowing moment. For heaven’s sakes, where does a story like this even come from?

In Grace Lin’s case, having been brought up in America, she had disregarded her Asian heritage. Her wise mother left Chinese folk tales and fairy tale books on the bookshelf. And she quietly, I’m sure, picked up these books and read them. Indeed, indeed, she found them flawed. There was an undeniable charm. Into her own internal bag of stories went the Chinese stories for another time. When she was ready as an adult to tell her own stories, out came pieces of those old stories, including the charm of them.

The psychologist Carl Jung talks about what is in our unconscious, that there are whole stories that reside in all of us, perhaps have resided over time. When rising to the surface, our surface, they often have an almost dreamlike or nightmarish quality to them.

Characters, outsized in Grace Lin’s case. Goldfish Guide, Magistrate Tiger, Jade Dragon, Buffalo Boy, the journey to the man in the moon itself, outsized, the place, Dragon Gate, City of Bright Moonlight, Never Ending Mountain, outsized, at times nightmarish, at times dreamlike, with wide and emotional power fueled by a range of very human and magical emotions, fear, anticipation, caution, affection.

Her story, like a gathering summer storm, simply transcends. Put that on a post-it on the wall behind your computer: I have permission to let go to story, to let go to what is in me.

And what about the unlikely subject, the peach. How exactly does that peach function in this story? Once a year I teach at Manhattanville College during which the assignment is frequently a short story of about 10 to 15 pages. One weekend some time was left over and I assigned an additional three-page story using three objects, an orange, a blue vase, and a newspaper. That was it. Write a story using an orange, a blue vase, and a newspaper. That year, in years to come, in similar classes, the most powerful stories have come not from the labored over 15-page stories but from the quick three-page object-centered stories.

Why, I asked myself, how did this happen when they spent so much time writing and rewriting the longer stories? I believe the answer is: there is no time to ruminate or squeeze a story into existence. No time to overthink, the writers having only a little time and focused by these simple but concrete objects, the orange, blue vase, and newspaper, simply let go to story. It has always intrigued me that simple objects should have so much narrative power, almost, almost a transcendent power in themselves.

Anyone who has taken any class of mine knows that I feel this way. I like the essay Tree and Leaf by Niggle, an essay by Tolkien. It’s an extraordinarily powerful essay because it confides in the writer where real power lies. Tolkien implies you are not writing with your whole, whole box of pencils if you don’t understand the power of basic Earth objects or elements. What elements or objects are we talking about? A fire, a piece of wood, a stream, a stone, a wave, a tree, a leaf, the elemental stuff of our world, an orange, a peach.

A peach could tell, can be, right? Poets know this to be true, but I say the prose writer, knowing these elements and using them brings a resonant power and authenticity to narrative as well. To stories of secondary worlds, worlds you as a writer create, and stories of primary worlds. The world that you inhabit. When I read Kate DiCamillo’s The Tale of Despereaux, a tale set in a fantasy world, and saw how she danced around soup. Soup, for goodness sakes. I was amazed. The Queen died for loving it. The kingdom was ruled by the rules for it. The tiny mouse Despereaux, whose story this was, was brought to his knightship by events caused by it. Listen:

The Queen loved soup. She loved soup more than anything in the world except for the Princess Pea and the king. And because the Queen loved it, soup was served in the castle for every banquet, every lunch, and every dinner. And what soup it was! Cook’s love and admiration for the Queen and her palate moved the broth that she concocted from the level of mere food to a high art. On this particular day, for this particular banquet, Cook had outdone herself. The soup was a masterwork, a delicate mingling of chicken, watercress, and garlic. Roscuro, the cellar rat, as he surfaced from the bottom of the Queen’s capacious bowl, could not help taking a few superlative sips. “Lovely,” he said, distracted for a moment from the misery of the existence. “Delightful.”

 

“See!” shouted the princess. “See!” She stood. She pointed her finger right at Roscuro. “It is a rat. I told you that it was a rat. He was hanging from the chandelier, and now he is in mama’s soup.” The musicians stopped playing their guitars, and the jugglers stopped juggling, and the noble people stopped eating. The Queen looked at Roscuro. Rascuro looked at the Queen. Reader! In the spirit of honesty, I must utter a difficult and unsavory truth. Rats are not beautiful creatures. They aren’t even cute. They are really rather nasty beats, particularly if one happens to appear in your bowl of soup with pieces of watercress clinging to his whiskers.

Ah, DiCamillo knows this source of power. Did you notice how, in loving this element, soup, she uses it sufficiently, repeating it, playing with it, elevating it to the status of character in its own right? Did you doubt the story transcends? I’m not even sure of these short, remarkable passages with their rhythmic beats and imaginative images, as well as the courtly story itself, came from the author’s head or her unconscious but they came outsized or in this case mini-sized and outrageous, giving focus and authenticity to her story.

Surely to make so much of something so simple; soup. I love it but this; put this on a note above your computer: Is there a concrete object–orange, spool of thread, peach–that should be part of your story? What powerful part can it play? I do notice the transcending happens in early moments of a book as well as climactic moments. It has to do with what is needed at the various points in a story; at an early point and a minor complication a delicate transcendence will do; at a climax an aesthetic transcendence an over-the-top transcendence.

It’s a question of the needs of the story, dear writer, and of course you begin to see, particularly through DiCamillo’s Despereaux, her voice is part of a story that transcends that mysterious vehicle of the voice. By now don’t we all, don’t we all agree that voice is important, essential maybe, maybe even crucial? Isn’t it what you hear at every conference, every workshop, sometimes followed by these questions:
“My story is just a little school story. Is voice necessary?” Yes.
“My story is just a nonfiction biography. Is voice necessary?” Yes.
“My story is just a little picture book. Is voice necessary?” Yes.

Is voice necessary for a book of any stripe that hopes to be transcendent? Yes, yes, yes, for goodness sakes, then tell me, what is voice? Many years ago, I gave a speech on voice, that mysterious element of writing that everyone tells you is essential. I said then, and I will say it again, that it is probably the first thing an editor looks at when beginning to read a fresh manuscript.

Does the story have voice? A resonant and very individual voice enchants us, but more important, it convinces us the story is authentic, that a real someone is talking intimately to us, that the story is worth listening to. It is an essential element of writing, essential for hitting a story out of the ballpark, for going far enough, it is the vehicle for transcending. Oh my goodness, there are so many ways I would describe voice.

First and foremost, it is almost always conversational. There is an informality about it and an intimacy: “Shush, I am sharing a story with you” and it is like a thumbprint of the narrator or writer of everything the writer or narrator is. The way the writer or narrative breathes to the way she or he expresses or exclaims. Reader, remember DiCamillo? Reader, in the spirit of Odyssey, I must utter a difficult and unsavory truth. Rats are not beautiful creatures.

I’m convinced voice is driven by the writer’s passion for the story he or she is telling. Writer, in the spirit of honesty, I must utter a difficult and perhaps surprising truth. Your own passion for your story in large part creates your voice, no question. Dear writer, put this on a post-it on the wall behind your computer: Choose a story that you can feel passionate about because your very passion will help you discover your voice.

But let another book show you what voice is. It is another runner-up Newbery, a surprise hit called Savvy, by Ingrid Law. The woman who wrote it had not really written before, but clearly she was a natural storyteller. Her characters move around “savvy,” like the stripe around a barber pole as they commandeer a bus to take them to their ailing father.

But it is first of all, the voice that charms the reader with its authenticity and passionate demand to be heard. Listen:

“When my brother Fish turned 13, we moved to the deepest part of inland because of the hurricane and of course the land that had caused it. I had liked, I had liked living down south on the edge of land next to the pushing pulling waves. I had liked it with a mighty kind of liking so moving had been hard, hard like the pavement the first time I fell off my pink, my pink two-wheeler and my palms bare burned like fire from all the hurt just under the skin. But it was plain that Fish could live nowhere near or nearby or next to or close to or on or around any large body of water. Water had a way of, of triggering my brother and making ordinary everyday weather take a frightening turn for the worse. Unlike any normal hurricane, Fish’s birthday storm had started without warning. One minute, my brother was tearing paper from presents in our backyard near the beach. The next minute, both Fish and the afternoon sky went a funny and fearsome shade of gray, gaining momentum and tipping the wrapping paper out of his hands, sailing it high up into the sky with all of the balloons and streamers roiling together and disintegrating the birthday party in a blender.

 

Groaning and cracking, trees shuddered and bent over, trouble uprooting and falling as easily as sticks in wet sand. Rain pelted us, the gravel thrown by a playground bully as windows shattered and shingles stripped off the roof as the storm surged and the ocean waves tossed and churn, spilling raging water and debris farther and farther up the beach. Mama and Papa grabbed hold of Fish and held tight while the rest of us ran for cover. Mama had to keep my brother calm and help him ride out the storm.

Oh my goodness, it is tempting to read on and on. The book is so full, is so full of voice. Would you call that voice original? Would you call that voice original? Would you call the words she uses original? Can you feel them driven by the author’s passion for her story?

Here it’s rhythms, rhythms that clearly have come from the author herself, maybe her own savvy. “Perfect. Anything she made was perfect. Everything she did was perfect. Even when she messed up, Mama messed up perfectly.”

And how about the images that she chooses? Did you cotton to them? To the idea of savvy itself? To the narrator’s analogies that seem to have just popped up out of nowhere? Disintegrating like a birthday party in a blender? To her tremendous energy: “My brother gripped the edge of the picnic table as the wind kicked up around him, gaining momentum and ripping the wrapping paper out of his hands, sailing it high up into the sky with all of the balloons or the narrator getting my cheeks full of and round with air then floating up toward the ceiling like my very own happy birthday balloon.”

What do you call that kind of writing? Is it over the top? Out of the ballpark? Did she go far enough? It is certainly sassy and spirited. It is certainly original. Is it transcendent? I think it is. And I think she had to let go to get at it, that it came directly out of her subconscious, her words, her energy, with her intellect, along for the ride.

Put a post-it behind your computer: Am I writing? Is my narrator speaking with voice? Am I using words and rhythms that come from me? Maybe you should add: Am I sassy? Enough. Put this also on a post-it behind your computer: Originality of story comes in part from the individuality of voice.

In addition to choosing the right words and voice, there is a shape to a story that transcends. I need to make certain to tell you that. The shape is something like a deep breath long, something like walking out on your porch in the early morning as day is breaking, emptying out your nighttime breath, then taking a new deep breath and breathing and breathing until at some exquisite moment there is a catch in your breath: you exhale, feeling this absolute, absolute satisfaction of it in your story, your sunrise, needs to be there or the promise of it.

The air needs to be crisp. The confidence to take the breath needs to be there and seen, or story and then the breathing in and seen or story right there. The rising, breathing in, breathing in until you are just ready to exhale then right there: that catch in the breath, then the exhale. If everyone takes that morning breath right now, that is listening. Did you feel what it feels like at the top of your breath before you exhale? The catch, then the satisfaction as you exhale? That’s transcending. Chapters are shaped like that; many–not all but many–scenes are shaped like that. Whole novels are shaped like that if they transcend.

One of my favorite transcending scenes called a narrative breath is a book called Highway Cats by Janet Lisle. This author is incredible; she could direct a play. She shapes her chapters and the book so magnificently. This is no fantasy. This is definitely a story of this world, though this understage is taken by a group of scruffy highway cats. A bunch of yowling misfits who have had more of life than they even want to think about. There is Shredder, whose ears are torn, and whose eyes suspicious.

There’s Kahlia Koo, a female cat, a shady background, who runs a rat farm. There are those reprobates, Murray-the-Claw and Jolly Roger. Out of the day-to-day of ordinary life, they are safe on their patch of cemetery land between the mall and the highway, spending their days betting on roadkill, whether various adventuring animals will make it across the highway alive or not. And then the mayor of the town decides it’s time to get out its bulldozers and take back the derelict patch of land. The story is set, the breathtaking:

The sun had barely risen the next day when the startup roar of an engine ripped like an explosion into the peaceful hush of the little forest. It was joined by a second roar and the third until the air itself seemed to scream in pain. The noise came from the shopping center parking lot. A small army of men had gathered there, had gathered there during the early hours and was now ready with a battery of earth-moving machines to advance on the woods. The men’s boots were laced, their hard hats were strapped down, and their faces were grim, or if they were, they as if they were really soldiers about to enter a combat zone around them. An extraordinary scene was taking place. Several dozen highway cats were attempting to rig themselves out in what happened to be, in fact, rubbish. Tissue boxes, cracker boxes, chip bags, burger wrappers, fried chicken tubs, and paper cuffs. Takeout food containers and instant cocoa packets were just a few of the items that were being snatched up by the cats and tried on for size. They came from the pile of trash that Murray and Roger had brought up from the highway the night before.

 

“Our plan of attack is as follows,” Khalia Koo began. “We’ll be low with the road coop. I’m gonna stop, George. Okay, I’m gonna begin. We’ll lie low until the road coop is just outside the graveyard when I give the first signal and we’d be best if everyone could howl. Can you do that?” A few of the youngest cats, delighted by the invitation, began to yaw and meow and excruciating tones at the top of their lungs; see the effect was ghastly. The other cats flattened their ears. “Excellent. That’s just what we want,” Khalia Koo told them. She went on: “At my second signal there must be another round of howls with the addition of some wailing screams. Imagine that you are sinking slowly into quicksand or better yet, being ambushed by coyotes.” The cats shivered and glanced over their shoulders at the mention of coyotes. “We must stand up and move together in our disguises, no one rushing ahead. This is very important: together we terrify the road workers. Single will have no eff, single will have no effect whatever. Is this understood?”

 

It was by now. Most cats had put on their containers and were hardly recognizable as cats at all except for those telltale lengths of fur protruding from beneath all tails out of sight call you worn gazing with satisfaction at the sinking heap of four-legged trash standing in front of our…We are no longer what we were. We are now what we have never been, an apparition of horror, of horror. Now heavy footsteps in a thundering tread of machinery could be heard coming uphill. The cats lowered themselves and their disguises into the high grass; closer, the noise came closer and closer. All eyes trained on Khalia’s Siamese tail, an elegant, dark ribbon rising up through this long grass. A gritty smell of hot machinery swirled, swirled like a dust storm into the graveyard. The kits sneezed, the cats coughed. It came. Above the weeds, Khalia’s tail waved like a gallant flag.

 

A blood-curdling howl poured from the throat of every cat in the graveyard. A sound so beautiful and penetrating that it cut through the roar of a bulldozer just then, cresting the hill. A line of approaching hard hats glanced uneasily around. One worker held up his hand to stop the bulldozer. It halted, growing and panting like an unleashed dog. Now, came once again, Khalia Koo’s tail flashed in the weeds and the cats let loose with a second howl, a wild crescendo of ghoulish wails and cataclysmic shriek as all life on earth were about to come to an end.

 

The work crew froze at the entrance to the cemetery. When nothing could be seen there, they looked at each other and then tearfully up into the sky. Here was the perfect moment for the right signal, the third signal Khalia saved. Khalia waved her tail. Rise, between the long grasses. The distinguished cats came to their feet and began with slow and steady steps to move forward across the cemetery. The effect was horrifying, as if a monstrous field of trash had come to life between the graves, a living, breathing ride of furious-eyed garbage that slobbered and hissed and slivered toward the road crew. “Help! Run!” The workers didn’t wait to ask what kind of apparition this could be. They ran, pushing and yelling and tripping over each other, caught in the retreat. Two bulldozers, a dump truck and a front-loader reversed gear and accelerated at top speed down the hill.

 

The machine bored backwards through the little woods and following close behind the running workers heaved back into the parking lot where they flattened several parked cars in their haste to get across the mangling sounds. Several cats peered out from under their disguises. Are they gone? They are. Did we do it? We did. We did.

Where was the catch in the breath? Somewhere between the monstrous field of trash coming alive and the bulldozer works yelling and tripping each other as they roared backwards, then through the little woods: transcendent.

But let’s not forget the fantastic cosmic change. Look, it isn’t enough in a book that transcends for the dog to get the award for best pet, for the girl to get the boy or the boy to get the dog. A transcendent story has to do with the interior life or lives of the character or characters. After what they do or become or rise to, if we have our druthers, we want a character who may be on the other side of okay, but who is mostly a good character. To rise to a human standard that we ourselves, every child, every adult, every male, every female aspire to. Someone loyal or courageous or persevering. Someone outcast who against type, overcomes. Someone who stands up to adversity or the Llan or the tyrant to social narrowness or profundity. to him or herself.

Someone spirited, who breathtakingly survives, whether it is in a school hall or on the top of a mountain, a wandering child using her father’s story as a map to discover her fortune, a two-ounce mouse who has fallen in love with a full-size princess, a group of ragtag cats who have fallen in love with three naive kittens, who want characters to overcome because there is promise in their overcoming that we and our children, the smallest, the most unimportant, the ordinary, can overcome too.

Here are a few post-its: Do my scenes or chapters or book itself rise enough? Do I take a deep enough narrative breath? And importantly, do I win a catch in the breath at the moment of climax? Here’s another: Does my character overcome, stand up, make a difference? Is he or she a part of cosmic change? You can see why the idea for story itself matters so much. Does a writer get a great idea sitting over a cup of coffee at the breakfast table? Does he or she get it for something they read in the paper like, “Mayor promises to clean up the deserted cemetery land between the mall and Route 84 and the wild animals that have invaded it?” Or from some accumulating sense of injustice in their bones, something that drives a writer to share her incredible sense of that injustice?

Where did the idea for soup as a kingdom rulemaker come from, or the idea of a young girl going after the man in the mood? Where did the idea for a story about derelict cats, knight-like and courage, with helmet like cracker boxes and chicken buckets on their heads, attacking bull-dozers like so much garbage?

Where did it come from? For that matter, where did the incredibly imaginative idea for Holes by Louis Sachar come from? That crazy hole-digging story about Stanley Yelnats, or where the wild things come from, that out-and-out celebration of a child’s monsters?

How about From the Mixed-up Files of Basil E. Frankwiler, where two children sneak into a bathroom stall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in order to spend the night? How about the idea for The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, Newbery award-winning, where a little boy whose parents are murdered crawls away before the murderers can get him into a graveyard where the ghosts adopt him? Not only a story transcendent in shape or voice or scene or tone, but transcendent in the very idea that inspired this story in its originality and potential, its opportunity for cosmic change.

As they begin their stories, exactly what are Lisle and DiCamillo and Grace Lin and the others following? An outline cut in stone? Analysis of plot and theme in a three-hole binder? Or with basic goals in mind, are they taking a deep breath following the sense of story that sits in their bones and that has sat in their bones a long time? Like Grace Lin, they begin to read stories perhaps? To be swept into the ways and worlds of tales and books by ancient or contemporary storytellers? Or are they following stories emotionally and with a sense of freedom driven by their own private passions for what’s right or fair or beautiful?

Do you know what is in your bones? Have you taken a deep breath? Do you know what the ecstatic or transcendent moment or moments are? Can you get there in your story with words? Have you listened to yourself well enough to know?

Here’s a post-it: Are there opportunities in your story for ecstatic or transcending moments? Have I used them?

Every once in a while an editor picks a manuscript and is thrilled by it. I like to see the words satisfied. You read a manuscript, you take its journey, you hear its words, you enter its forest and climb its mountains with a hero or heroine that takes you to a new place or thinking about what human beings even are.

And when you are done, you sit back as if after a full meal to a full breath and feel satisfied. I picked up Mockingbird as a second submission by Katherine Erskine, a former Chautauquan, that she had written a first book for me called Quaking featuring a wonderfully quirky character, a foster kid who was sassy in all personality and who was an obsessively-driven believer in peace. The book got one starred review and other good reviews. Nice first book, but Kathy’s struggle with waking, she told me afterwards, sShe squeezed it into existence, but not so with Mockingbird, her second book.

Kathy lived near the school shootings at Virginia Tech some years ago and was powerfully affected by them. In addition, she has an Asperger syndrome child, and suddenly one day she sat down and wrote a book. As she tells it, the book almost wrote itself. The hero is Caitlin. Caitlin, whose brother is shot in a Virginia Tech-like school shooting, but that’s not the story. Caitlin’s brother Devon was Caitlin’s best friend, her only friend, and his loss to her was traumatic. Listen to this scene written in Caitlin’s voice. See if you can see through it, to the Caitlin who hurts, and the Caitlin who’s trying to climb the mountain of her own emotions. The chest that’s referred to in this short piece is a chest that Devon was almost finished making.

This is then from a chapter called The Day Our Life Fell Apart: At home I think about Devon’s heart. I sit on the sofa and look at it and look at his chest. It’s still under his gray sheet. There are rays of light coming in through the blinds and the dust twirls around in the beams in this this chest. And I wonder if any of the dust particles are Devon and if I can feel him. I close my eyes and I remember some of the things that happened on the day our life fell apart. That’s what dad called it. After we came home from the hospital that night with no Devon, dad was yelling and kicking the furniture and the walls and he started ponding the chest with his fists and shouting why, why, why, and he threw the woodworking books about and the mascot manual into Devon’s room and he slammed the door and said no, no, no, no, until I screamed at him, stop it, stop it, and then he put the sheet over the chest and now he never even looks at that scene.

 

I press myself against the sofa and squish my eyes tight and even though I try not to, I remember being at the hospital and how there were sharp lights and siren noises and loudspeaker noises and beeping noises and medicine smells and fondly people dressed in green pajamas and paper sh-paper slippers and to dad we tried but we couldn’t close your son’s chest. His heart, there was nothing left. There was nothing we could do, nothing we could do. I’m shaking and sucking my sleeve. And I try to stop thinking about the day our life fell apart. But when I open my eyes, Devon’s chest is staring at me.

 

So I slide off of the sofa and crawl over to it and pull the sheep up from the bottom and push underneath it and get inside the empty hollow chest. And I imagine myself as the heart, Devon’s heart. My arms are atrium, my legs are ventricles, and I pump the blood all around the right way because there has to be something I can do, something I can do. And first I pump the blood to the lungs to pick up, to pick up the oxygen. Then to the left atrium and ventricle, then to the aorta to go all around the body like it should. All my valves are working so the blood flow is right and I can feel the beat and rock, and I rock with it because rocking makes me feel alive.

 

And I will his chest to be alive. I pump the blood around Devon’s body, Devon, Devon. I say it louder and louder to make it true. And my whole body is beating for his louder and louder and wilder and wilder to my head is banging the sides of the chest, but I don’t care. Devon, Devon, Devon. And I hear dad’s voice screaming like at the hospital and I don’t want to hear it because I don’t want any part of the day our life fell apart to happen again. So I focus and become the heart louder and louder and harder and harder, but then I fall out of the chest because there’s no way to close it.

 

And I feel dad grabbing me, but all I can do is scream the words from the green hospital people: I tried, but there was nothing, nothing. I could do.

Transcending is rising through a mischief of words and hitting your mark. Getting that catch in the breath, often when you are lucky, letting words move rhythmically and consistently and progressively to a point universal in its profundity, cosmic change, life-giving, something every reader can get, take away, feel, some terribly human we’re in this together moment.

Where does the ability to transcend as a writer come from? It comes from everywhere. It comes from living in the present, in the textures of life. so that you know them. It comes from being a William Faulkner and sitting down at the docks listening to language there, from people watching and understanding or putting a name, name to the contours of their lives.

It comes from hearing the rhythms of your own voice and becoming comfortable with them, even if they break the rules of your fourth grade composition teacher. After all, the aberrations of your speech comes from you.

Place, your emotional place, your environment, your hearing place, indeed they come from the heartbeats of your own, of your own body.

Where does the ability to transcend come from? It comes from being a reader, reading books, particularly good books, but not just good books. It comes from reading broadly enough, from Tom Jones, to comic books, to Sarah Plain and Tall, to begin to put your own story bag elements and read and appreciate and begin to see how power that their own power in them.

Reading Dickens’ Great Expectations when Pip walks into Miss Havisham’s mansion, feeling the bristle in the dust of that. Reading James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and seeing the exquisite transcendent power of the last pages in chapter two, the pick-pack-puck of balls as they are battered across the yard.

Like reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie, feeling the rhythmic power of the scene where the grasshoppers, after having been in a kind of catatonic hibernation, begin to walk. thousands of grasshoppers walking across the dry plains, walking into the house itself, impossibly through cracks through windows, across the floor, demanding, demanding that we not only read, but not only read about this relentless walk but that we live it.

How is it that at this age, I have never forgotten those grasshoppers and the walk and how almost, almost it was as if someone shouted out loud, fly, because that’s what they did. They took flight all at once, all of the grasshoppers covering the sky.

So read and read and read. Recently, I gave a speech at Manhattanville College donating the books I’ve edited to their special collection. In it, I admitted that an editor is something of a cheerleader to her writers and artists.

Okay, I admit it. I am unabashedly a cheerleader for you, hearing this. I don’t know where you are in your writing. Perhaps you have discovered all that I have said already. I hope so. If you have not, I cheer you on beginning a new journey.

A journey away from the ordinary, to the youngish lands and people that are so key to our most basic selves that they become extraordinary. Story that has not construed power, but has genuine power. Story that, like the shutter of a butterfly’s wings, can make a difference to a child or to many children or to the reader reading along with the child.

I am cheering you and giving you permission to go to a new place as a writer, using more of yourself than you may have used before. Permission to transcend. My dear writers, going forward, surprise us.

More important, surprise yourselves. What a journey. Thank you.