Decatur Book Festival Time!

Come see me! It's free! It's on the Square in downtown Decatur, Georgia -- just outside the city of Atlanta. It's year three of the fabulous Decatur Book Festival. I'll be part of the SIBA Book Award panel at 5:30 on Saturday, and I'll be presenting on the children's stage on Sunday at 4pm.

Here's the entire weekend schedule. Look at all that talent!

Kerry Madden and I have books that are SIBA Book Award nominees, which gives us an excuse to hang out together. Elizabeth Dulemba and I don't need an excuse (well, neither do Kerry and I, but she lives in L.A. and Elizabeth is just next door). I'm going to spend today and tomorrow in the Sixties, then I'll make my way to Agnes Scott College on Friday night, where I'll meet up with friends and hear Billy Collins kick off the Festival.

And all weekend, there are a host of writers for children, for adults, writers of cookbooks, writers of science fiction and fantasy, poets, non-fiction writers, novelists... writers. And illustrators. And musicians. More than 300 in all. It's a star-studded event that fills downtown Decatur with words and music and food and festival goers.

Wanda Jewell, inimitable force of nature and executive director of SIBA, has declared the SIBA Book Award panel on Saturday night to be a Twitter Event. Huh? I had never heard of Twitter. Now I am ON Twitter. Come "follow" me -- my handle is deborahwiles.

For the SIBA panel, I needed to come up with 140-characters-or-less (characters, not words) answers to hard questions, and no more than 140 characters for an introduction. Here is the introduction of myself that I wrote for Wanda:

Deborah Wiles:

Grew up summers in Mississippi, with wacky relatives. Writes about them in her novels. National Book Award finalist. Lives in Atlanta. Married Rhett Butler.

How'd I do?

Mingling Past and Present

I'm so thick into 1962, it's ridiculous. I look up with a hazy "whaaa?" and three hours have passed. I'm working mostly at Panera, where the coffee refills are free, and the Caesar salad is crisp. I'm watching the Democratic National Convention each evening -- what a spectacle! --which catapults me into 2008, then I crash into bed and rise each morning with my face crumpled from a deep sleep and weird dreams mixing 1962, 2008, and the new configuration of our household, which of course changes the ebbs and flows... not to mention the tides.


But I am here! Remember when I said, way back when, that I had wrestled chapter one to the mat and was charging full steam ahead? (I even said that chapter one SINGS...)

Well... after talking with my editor two weeks ago, I realized that I had more wrestling to do with that first chapter... and the first chapter's flow is crucial, for me -- it's got to be right before the rest of it falls into place... no wonder I've been so bogged down.






So the past two weeks have been all about story -- the political process unfolding this week and next, and the politics of 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I'm trying to get the details right -- and I'm asking for help: Tom West is a geek. Is "geek" a word that would have been used in 1962? Would "nerd" be better? I've done a search, but so far haven't been able to figure this out. I need the right word -- it may be something else altogether. Weirdo. I don't know what we used for "geek" then. I can do a more thorough search at some point, but for now, I'm trying to keep moving.

I've also been consumed with reading the press surrounding the Democratic National Convention -- it has become my coffee reading in the morning, and I have to MAKE myself stop, in order to get to work. I read from a variety of sources, mainstream and not; I want to learn to think for myself about politics, and I want to know more -- back to the foundations, the fundamentals, just like anything we want to do well... we begin at the beginning.

This morning I read, in one opinion piece, that the Democratic National Convention is so boring it's fascinating. Thinking for myself, I have to agree. ha! But truly, so many history-making moments are happening this week -- I remember, waaaay back in 1984 , when Geraldine Ferraro was tapped for Walter Mondale's running mate... I made sure my eldest daughter, then 12 years old, sat in front of the television with me to watch that historic moment. "Remember you were here, and remember this day," I said.

Last night, younger daughter Hannah, age 22, and I sat together and watched Hillary Clinton's speech -- (did you dig that bright orange pantsuit? Ohmy! One comment heard in my family room: "She's dressed in Creamsicle!") But I loved her reference to the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pantsuits -- loved the cheer and the recognition of a YA title -- yahoo. But there was more than that going on, of course... much more.

I'm hooked these days, both on the political process and the 1960s. I'm watching MAD MEN right now -- anybody else out there a fan? Hannah and I are catching up on last season's episodes, and forging ahead with season two on Sunday nights at 10 Eastern on AMC. I have more to say about something in particular that sparked something else (can you be more eliptical, Debbie?), but that will have to wait for tomorrow.

My candidate spoke yesterday. Sigh. Maybe another year.

Tonight -- an historic roll-call. I want to be there. I watch this convention, and my past trips across the stage -- geez, I'm older than I thought I was.... I got positively teary when Ted Kennedy walked on stage. The dream lives on... my. Maybe it's all that time I'm spending in the Sixties. Time. And torches being passed... that's what I see this week, as much as anything else. It makes me realize, there is more time behind me now than there is in front of me, unless I live to be 110.

One more dip into 1962 before I call it a day and go home.

(All photos courtesy of the DNC website.)

A Southern Canon

It's 6am. A Carolina wren sings outside my window. I've been up, writing, finally this week, for two hours. More on process next week, when I'm back in full force with the Sixties Trilogy.

Five things I have loved this week:

1. The green curry with steamed tofu from Yum-Yum Thai.

2. Seeing my husband up and about after surgery on Monday. All will be well.

3. Catching up on sleep.

4. A house full of good, kind people.

5. Rereading my southern personal canon in the cracks between doctors and hospital and dispensing meds... these selections in my canon comfort me and bring me home:

THE REIVERS by William Faulkner
DELTA WEDDING by Eudora Welty
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee
GROWING UP IN THE SOUTH, edited by Suzanne Jones.

These books taught me how southerners write, what the southern story sounds like, and how southern childhoods can be evocative, funny, crazy, scary, meaningful, lyrical, blunt, and loving, all at the same time. They are unique, southern stories, as much as they are universal.

My copies of these four books are heavily underlined and annotated and full of my own wonderings. Each one was -- remains -- a college classroom for me. When I found GROWING UP IN THE SOUTH -- it took my breath away. If you buy this book, be sure to get the out-of-print edition (published in 1991) -- you can order it at abebooks. The newer edition has swapped out some of my favorite stories, and I wouldn't want you to miss them.

Here were some of the first mouth-watering stories I read about the south and southerners, written by southerners... I was transported to my own childhood -- the smell of chicken frying in a cast iron skillet, the sound of the grease popping, the feel of the air and the taste of honeysuckle, the riotous laughter that accompanied family stories, and I knew this writing -- these southern stories -- they were part of me and I wanted to tell my stories. So I began a study of southern writing, which led me to many, many different writers, but the books I list above are my favorites.

Here is how I learned to write.

I read like a writer -- how does she/he DO that? I pulled apart the prose, I studied it because I wanted to DO it, and I used the books I admired as my models of good writing. I copied phrases I loved -- words I adored -- into my notebook... I have notebooks filled with what Nancy Johnson calls "golden lines." Many of them I know by heart.





When I gave DELTA WEDDING to my mother, she handed it back months later saying she couldn't get through it. "Nothing happens!" she said. "Ellen gets up in the morning and says, 'I think I'll move this bush from here to there' -- I just couldn't go on!"

And DELTA WEDDING is on my top ten list of favorite novels. There is nothing like it in American literature... read the essay at the link above, and you'll see why. I think EVERYTHING happens in DELTA WEDDING... it's subtle, but it's there.

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD is a book I read yearly; I always get something new from it. I loved the book so much, I read it aloud to my children more than once, and I had them watch the movie with me so many times that one of them declared "A Moratorium on Mockingbird," which is still in effect today. But I sneak it in, when I'm by myself. Horton Foote wrote the screenplay; he is another one of my southern-writer heroes. The wondrous musical score, by Elmer Bernstein, is one I listened to in a playlist that accompanied the writing of THE AURORA COUNTY ALL-STARS.

MOCKINGBIRD was the ultimate for me, until I found other southern writers... I didn't even know they existed, in high school... but I found them, yes I did.

THE REIVERS is Faulkner's most accessible novel, a small gem of a story, written by a master storyteller who takes his time, is in no hurry to let the story spin out and out... and out.

I have learned to take my time with a story as well. The conventional wisdom is that something has to happen right-away in children's books, we must find the problem and the protagonist and get on with it. Well, yes... but not so fast, not so fast. The traditional southern storyteller reels you in, line by line, word by word, paragraph by paragraph, until you have taken so much of the bait you can't stand not going on...



...until you are in love with the characters and the setting and the possibilities as much as you are the problem... we want you to know us for life, we southerners... we want you to fall into our stories, to consider our characters as real people -- in my case, Comfort, Declaration, Peach, Dismay... Ruby and Melba Jane and Miss Eula... House and Cleebo and Honey and Finesse and Pip and .... you get the picture.

They are real to me, my characters, and my job is to make them -- and their world -- real to you. I'm still studying these four books in my personal canon, to figure out how to do that better and better... and better.

These writers are some of my teachers. Who are yours?

All Roads Lead Home

Years ago, when I lived in Frederick, Maryland and had four children still living at home, then three, then two... we had Sunday Dinner. We ate our big meal in the middle of the day, and then, as darkness fell, we usually had syrup-drenched waffles and crisply-fried bacon for supper. I still have the old waffle iron; every time I dig around in the lower cupboards looking for a 9x13 pan, I move the waffle iron out of my way and I think about those days, and how I never make waffles anymore.

But I do have Sunday Dinner again. Jim and I eat our big meal midday almost every day now, because I'm home (I'm home!) and he is a musician and works many evenings, and because we just like it like that... I work mornings, take a break for dinner, and go back to work in the afternoon. Sometimes we even catch a nap before my staff visits from across the street.

It's a very good system for us, and now that three of my four children live here in Atlanta, I've decided to institute Sunday Dinner again. Come if you can make it, I say, I'll make plenty, and we'll be here.

Last Sunday Zach baked the bread. He used rosemary from our garden, and it was oh-so-good. We ate in Irene -- the hot weather has broken, and eating outside is bearable.


Here are leftovers on Monday, salad and cornbread I made from scratch. I hid the mashed potatoes under the salad; if'n I don't see 'em, the calories don't count, right? Right?








Supper the same day -- add an egg for protein, for this mostly-vegetarian girl.

This Sunday, dinner is later. I'm off to the airport to pick up a friend who is home from vacation. Hannah is on her way home from Florida with friend Richard in tow... and all of Richard's belongings. Richard is moving in for a time. Richard is a love. We are happy to have him. And our family of choice expands.


Marianne Richardson and the lower school teachers at Heritage School are family of choice now as well.

We spent Friday together, writing our personal narratives, laughing and sharing and sometimes even shedding a tear or two -- oh what a lucky writer am I -- I know it.

I wanted to leave you with a few photos of Marianne's classroom, where we met. The books on this table represent Marianne's summer reading. She has offered these books to her seventh-grade students and she Has Opinions. We chewed on these books at lunchtime (!). Oh, to be a student in this seventh-grade classroom!

Oh, to sit on a chair at this "Island Library" -- a print of a painting by Jamie Wyeth that hangs above the books.





Oh, to have this classroom library like this one! Here is one wall:


You can see the Wyeth and the summer reading below it. Look at all the picture books in this seventh-grade classroom --

Marianne still uses picture books extensively, and reads aloud every day to her students.



Another wall. more picture books, as well.

Excellent, excellent.

How many of you read to your students every day? How many of you read, period, every day? I'm finding that reading for pleasure is harder and harder to do -- I've got to make a point of making time. And with a library like this one, I would have no end of delicious reads... one reason I'm sure Marianne keeps such a classroom library (well... for her students, not for me!); a library of many years' worth of collecting.

I would love to hear about your classroom libraries, how you use them, how you have collected them, how they have changed over the years, and how they continue to change -- your hopes for them, your dreams.

We begin -- all fourteen of us are assembled for a day of writing together -- personal narrative writing, as that's what we must teach our students as well -- and Marianne stands to introduce me and gather us together... behind her to her right is a bulletin board of places she visited with friend Meredith (who is with us as well; Meredith Wilson is Heritage's art teacher -- I want her for my art teacher as well). Those places are all artistic -- Martha's Vineyard, Louisa May Alcott's home, Emily Dickinson's home, the Wyeth home in Maine, Walden Pond, Marianne's childhood home in Greenwood, Mississippi... "I know a place..." (Do you see the E.B. White in the foreground?)


And the stories! All about home, in one way or another. Dads who took the whole neighborhood to get ice cream ("We didn't even ask him to take us..."); or to see The Beatles ("He couldn't get over the girls screaming!); pulling a little red wagon and selling newspapers with front page stories of Elvis on them ("These were not ordinary papers!"); a friend falling out of the car during a car pool ride and becoming a hero ("horn roaring, wheels screaming!"); spending Christmas with Granddaddy ("bored out of my mind!") and yet treasuring every moment; Grandpa coloring his one-and-only-time with a grandchild ("Where's the orange?"); walking the beach with Mom and Dad and finding out that Daddy is happiest right then, right there, with his family ("balanced on a little cliff of sand"); the gift of Chanel No. 5 ("My mother said it was an apology."); the telephone party lines ("Catherine, is that YOU?"); and "What do you mean, there's no bathroom?" and on and on and ON -- and we shared strategies for teaching personal narrative writing.

We had stories to tell on Friday -- and we told them. Wrote them. Shared them. We know one another so much better. And if we tell these stories to our students, and help them tell and write their stories... just think of how much better off the entire world will be. It's all about story. It really is.


It's all about home.

Maybe the memory of home is held in Sunday Dinner, or restructuring a family, or finding treasure in a classroom library, or being brave enough to scribble in a notebook, dig for a memory, and share it...

Whatever it is, the magic of story is what brings us home.

Thank you, Marianne, thank you teachers, thank you Heritage School...

Write for your life! Tell your stories.

Telling Our Stories

Off to Newnan, Georgia this morning, to work with teachers at The Heritage School. This is my third time working at Heritage, and I love it there. Today is a day for just us. We will work on our own personal narratives... I can't wait. I'm bringing essays with me, and lots of books, lots of pictures, lots of possibilities. I love to watch story come to life as it tiptoes out of someone's mind and heart, asking for expression.

It's a mystery, story. I seem to have spent a lifetime studying it, even before I knew that's what I was doing. I internalized rhythms and words and memorized whole paragraphs of what I admired... "how does she do that?" I asked, over and over... and I studied.

I wrote a "manifesto" when I was 26 years old -- I remember where I was when I wrote it -- sitting on the steps of a townhouse, newly married (for the second time), with two small children who were still sleeping that morning. I sat on the steps with a pen and my notebook, and I wrote, in part:

"The purpose behind my writing is to find my purpose in life. To understand why I am living and where I go from here. To understand the purpose of life itself."

Whoa! Can you say intense? I went on for an entire page, I dated it (January 25, 1979), and I wondered what to do next. I wanted to write, but I did not know what I had to write about. It's the same for all of us when we start out, especially fourth and fifth graders who are required to write personal narratives and who sit in classrooms and say "I have nothing to write about!" It's hard to see ourselves as the authors of our own stories -- hard to see those stories as valuable, meaningful, crucial to our well-being and our ability to understand ourselves and find empathy for one another.

Sometimes we do know how important our stories are, we can't even articulate it but we feel it, and we feel the stories there, on the tips of our fingers or tongues or hearts... but what are they? How do we help them reveal themselves?

It took me years to understand that the world under my nose was the one I knew best and that I did have something to say about it... I studied others who wrote about their worlds. E.B. White remains my hero of the personal essay -- ONE MAN'S MEAT is my favorite compilation and part of my personal canon, as is THE ESSAYS OF E.B. WHITE and even THE LETTERS OF E.B. WHITE. I learned so much about the well-turned sentence from the LETTERS -- not to mention tone and humor and surprise and life on the farm, the writing life, love of family and barn. Voice, voice, voice.

I still read these letters, and my daughter Hannah does, too. Now and then she'll pick up White and say, "I need this today."

I know just what she means.

I found White in the stacks of the Tenley Circle branch of the D.C. public library in 1976. I was very poor, a single parent of two young children, and I wanted so much to be sure I was doing a good job as a parent -- I checked out anything I could find about how to be a better parent, how to cook, how to clean, how to sew, how to -- how to.

And I wanted to write, so I migrated over to the 800s eventually and I found Thurber, Perelman, Goodman, Didion and more. But White was my treasure. I read everything he wrote that I could get my hands on -- and when I could afford it, I began to add those books to my collection. Most of them are used, picked up for a dollar or two at the local used bookstore. I was glad to have them. I've written all over them, have underlined ad nauseum... I went back to school in a classroom of one, and White became my teacher -- THE POINTS OF MY COMPASS, THE SECOND TREE FROM THE CORNER, HERE IS NEW YORK, and more... they occupy a shelf all their own in my studio, like an altar of sorts. Every day I pass by them and pay silent homage.

For years, I waxed enthusiastic about White to anyone who would listen. A friend who went to Maine brought me back pictures of White's farm. Another, years later, brought me photos of White's grave. I knew all about son Joel and the Brooklin Boat Yard, about Roger Angell before he was Roger Angell, about Katherine White's sacrifice in leaving (physically, anyway) the New Yorker in order to move to Maine to be with White, I knew about the death of that pig, about Fred and his arthritis, about Henry Allen's ingenuity, about the coon tree outside the bedroom window, the time the chimney caught fire and the living room filled with White's firefighting friends...

As a writer, I was an essayist first. I soaked up White's life and his writing, and I am still learning so much from him.

So these books are in my canon. I am taking them to Heritage this morning. I will read from them and we'll talk about personal narrative -- essay -- and we'll make lists, in our notebooks, of our own memories, for our own stories. We'll select one thing to write about today, each of us, and we'll spend the day with that memory. Eventually, we'll pay attention to some of those Strunk and White rules, too. Years ago, as I would prepare an essay to go out into the world, I would sit with my Strunk and White and go over every rule and apply it to my essay: had I done these things?

Write with nouns and verbs.
Use the active voice.
Use definite, specific, concrete language.
Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!

I'm still working on it.

Watermelon Days

Salt or no salt? Seeds or no seeds? Yellow or red? How about a nice coral color, like this one? It can't seem to make up its mind whether it's red or yellow. But one thing it is, is delicious.

When I was kid, my Uncle Jim walked across the dirt road to the garden and thumped on several watermelons in the patch until he found the just-right one, and brought it to the picnic table by the house, where he cut into it with a huge knife, and sliced up pieces of it for all of us. I'd hold the wedge in my hands, bite into that dark red sweetness, and let the warm, sticky juice run down my chin and arms and drip off my elbows. It was perfect on a hot August day.

It's so hot now, on this August day, I can hardly think. It's stay-inside and keep-the-shades-drawn days. We're still in the midst of a terrible drought in Georgia, and everything is wilted, including me.

I was going to post about THE REIVERS, one of my favorite personal canon books, but my mind is mush, so instead I'll share a story.

(Aside: thanks so much for the email about personal canons -- and wow -- y'all sure are widely read. Next week I'll try to post some responses -- they are so much fun to read, and I appreciate your thoughts about my choices as well.)

Now, my story.

So many folks have written me about Coleen Salley -- yes, she is the friend I mentioned in my post of July 24, saying that a dear friend of mine wasn't herself right now.

I've written quite a bit about Coleen on both this blog and the tour blog (starting from the most recent posts), here and here and here and here and here. You'll see lots of photos in these links, and I've brought a couple here to share.

Coleen has so many friends, and her adventures in life and love and children's literature are so wide and so varied (like those personal canons of ours) and so deep and heartfelt. She has lived life to the hilt, and I am privileged to have spent so much time with her in these past several years, traveling together, visiting one another. The picture above was taken on Jim's and my honeymoon in New Orleans. We visited Coleen, of course.


This picture was taken at IRA this past May, when Coleen came to Atlanta early and had a visit with me and Jim.

She is a friend and more -- Coleen has been a mother to me. And I thought I would not write about this on the blog, not at all, I thought it would be too hard. I also know how many people lay claim to a piece of Coleen's heart, and I don't presume to be special.

I didn't want to say anything that might seem too personal to Coleen... but then I realized that she'd want everyone to know -- of course she would. She's all about telling stories -- the good, the bad, the happy, the sad --

"Honey, you tell every da*n one of 'em! It's how we get to know one another!" I found this Coleen quote in one of my notebooks.

Grab a copy of Coleen's Epossumondus and read it out loud in that voice that Coleen uses. And if you'd like to send a card -- Coleen's birthday was this past week -- you can send it here:

St James Retirement
ATTN Coleen Salley
HCE 503
333 Lee Dr.
Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70808

I'm sending thoughts of watermelon days, Coleen. Watermelon days, when the juice ran down your chin and arms and dripped right off your elbows. Let's split a watermelon soon and tell more stories. I'll bring the salt shaker, because I know by now, there is always bitter with the sweet. But we'll just embrace the messy glory, wipe our chins, and keep right on livin'.

I love you.

Me 'n Crispin's Crispian

I used to think I was the only person in the world who had read, loved, and remembered MISTER DOG: THE DOG WHO BELONGED TO HIMSELF, by Margaret Wise Brown. I thought it must be a rare book, and I was content to know that I had discovered a treasure. It wasn't until the Internet began to bring us closer to one another that I found out so many readers adored MISTER DOG as much as I do.

When I was little, I didn't know what I responded to in this book, but it became important to me in a way other Golden Books did not, not even SAILOR DOG, which was also a favorite, and probably for some of the same reasons, but I would not list it in my personal canon. But today, I can look back on who I am as a person and know that I was probably resonating to the themes of independence and autonomy -- the dog who belonged to himself, and the boy who belonged to himself.

I have always needed stretches of time alone, even as much as I treasure community. I'm an introvert (although, not a conservative, as Crispin's Crispian is -- although, if we use MWB's definition, probably I am), and being with people -- as much delight as it brings me -- wears me out in short order, and I always need time to recover. The first time I went to ALA, in 1996, I was so overwhelmed by the lights! noise! people! movement! that I would take the shuttle back to my hotel room and have a little cry, sit in the dark for a while, and then try the exhibit floor again. Too much, too much! I've gotten better at that, today, but I still need recovery time after lots of people or lots happening. That needed recovery time has sometimes, over the years, been seen by others as anti-social, but it's not meant to be that way -- it's meant to fill me up and make me ready for people again.

Solitude feeds me in the way that it nurtures Comfort (in her closet and on Listening Rock) in EACH LITTLE BIRD THAT SINGS. So something in MISTER DOG -- even at an early age, when I already possessed these leanings -- made a deep connection with me. Crispin's Crispian and the Boy Who Belongs To Himself decide to live together in the end. I loved those two completely independent souls deciding that they could live independently with one another. And I loved Garth Williams's art.

I also credit this book with giving me my first written ideas about a safe and loving home:

"Crispin's Crispian lived in a two-story dog house in a garden... with a warm fire that crackled in the winter and went out in the summer. His house was always warm... and upstairs there was a little bedroom with a bed in it... and there was plenty of room in his house for the boy to live there with him."

That sounded perfect to me. Gentle. Kind. Compassionate. I would grow up one day, and that's the kind of home I wanted.

For more about this book, there are many sources to visit, including Leonard Marcus's biography of Margaret Wise Brown, AWAKENED BY THE MOON. Here's a nice essay on the blog "New York Wanderer" that includes photos of the house where MISTER DOG is set, in Brooklyn. And here's one more that says it better than I can, perhaps, about that lovely fictional world that Margaret Wise Brown created in MISTER DOG and how it spoke to readers.


One more Little Golden Book, and I'm done with Golden Books as personal canon. I received this book for my birthday one year: THE GOLDEN BOOK OF 365 STORIES by Kathryn Jackson, illustrated by the fabulous Richard Scarry, and it became a constant companion for me when I was probably 8 years old. This book was a precursor to the Junior Classics and the Book of Knowledge. I loved reading the daily entry for each date, and especially finding the important dates -- my birthday, my brother's birthday, even my parents' anniversary -- I remember marking all the important days with little pencilled stars -- my first intentional, informational marking in a book (I have gone on to copious mark-ups in books, but that's a story for another time).

Before I graduated to longer books, this book made me feel as if I was reading a great big book, and it helped me tremendously with my reading skills, as I read it over and over and, for such a long time, there was always something new in it to read -- and there were "genres" -- a short story, a song, a poem, a fable, etc.

There's a good overview of this book here, at the blog "Collecting Children's Books." I had forgotten the "infinity" cover, but I well remember thinking that my brother's birthday got a great story, and I got this puny little poem -- but it was a GOOD poem, I told myself. Ha.

Finally, don't miss Walter Mayes's comments (and mine in return) on First Influences, Friday's blog post. Thanks, Walter, for the great thoughts, especially about Dr. Seuss (Walter is directing SEUSSICAL: THE MUSICAL in San Francisco!) and thanks for listing your personal canon as well. Walter defines personal canon: "books that are, in one way or other essential to my image of who I am." Yes, that's what I'm after.

I love that one of Walter's picks is the Rand McNally World Atlas. I had forgotten about the atlases! Oh, yes, how wonderful they were. I fell in love with geography in fifth grade, thanks to an atlas (don't remember which one) and a teacher who made geography scintillating -- is it any wonder that Great-great Aunt Florentine in EACH LITTLE BIRD THAT SINGS calls herself a geographer? (Which is shorthand for gossip, in Snapfinger, Mississippi.)

Did you love Crispin's Crispian, Sailor Dog, or Rand McNally? What early books are essential to your image of who you are today? I remember reading over and over again SAILOR DOG, just for the lyrical, rhythmical language. The very sentence structure awed me (although I wouldn't have been able to articulate that as a child -- I just knew I heard something special). Here's the first sentence: "Born at sea in the teeth of a gale, the sailor was a dog. Scuppers was his name."

I'm deep, deep, deep into the Sixties this week. Hope you are deep, deep into something just as absorbing -- maybe it's vacation! It's hot here. It's August. The cicadas chorus outside my window at 8am -- time to get to work.

First Influences

Welcome to Books as Autobiography, or personal canon post #1. Welcome to several books in my canon, starting with THE CAT IN THE HAT by Dr. Seuss.

This is the first book I remember reading by myself. Not only do I remember reading it, I remember the moment I learned to read, the moment that letters formed themselves into words that I could understand on the page, sound out myself, say out loud -- read. It was magic, pure magic, and my life would never be the same. Learning to read was one of the pivotal events of my life; from this book flowed all others, so I must honor it and give it its number one place on my bookshelf.

THE CAT IN THE HAT was published in 1957, when I was four years old. It would have been a newly published book in my home, a book my parents bought for me and my brother. I don't remember my mother reading it to me, but she must have... yes? I don't remember my mother reading to me much at all, but I do remember always having books around the house, and I vividly remember my father with his nose in a book. I don't think my mother was much of a reader, although she came to mysteries at some point and devoured those.

I was a solo reader early. The very idea that words represented stories thrilled me, although I couldn't articulate that when I was young -- I just knew that something juicy was held within the pages of a book, and I wanted to read it. It was something I could do well when, all through the years of my growing up, I felt there were so many things I couldn't do.

I loved the rhyme in THE CAT IN THE HAT (it's still brilliant, to me, today, how 223 words, arranged in anapestic tetrameter, tell such an engaging, enduring story). I loved the sense of naughtiness that the Cat flounced around with, his devil-may-care attitude, and his sincere sadness at being sent away, unappreciated, at the end. I loved the humor -- I laughed out loud. I loved the absurd. I loved the independence of Sally and her brother, obviously latch-key kids, which in 1957 was unheard of... here came Mother through the door, in her heels and dress, home from work -- yes? That was my interpretation. I didn't realize until I was much older, how much that independence meant to me... but more on that later.

THE CAT IN THE HAT was radical, a breakthrough in children's books and a blessed balance to the Dick-and-Jane childhoods that passed for children's books at that time in schools, but all I really understood when I was five-years-old was that I could read this book.

I wouldn't have known that I was learning phonics in school, but that's how I learned to read, by learning the connections between letter patterns and the sounds they represent. Wikipedia's entry on phonics states: "Phonics instruction requires the teacher to provide students with a core body of information about phonics rules, or patterns."

I clearly remember learning these patterns... along with the pattern of daily life in my family home, the patterns of morning-noon-night, the patterns of the seasons and more -- I was decoding the world I lived in, and I found it exhilarating. Reading was another method of decoding. There were patterns to figure out -- let me at 'em!


I stared at those letters, and they began to make sense to me. I couldn't, and then suddenly I could -- I could read. I also could learn... all by myself. I could begin at the beginning -- with anything -- and start to decode it. This knowledge, this desire, has stayed with me all my life, and it is how I have approached learning -- begin at the beginning. What is the foundation of what I want to learn? Go back and find out. You'll see me do this as I write about more of my personal canon. This is a skill I've learned to use in my life with anything new I want to learn.

And one more reason this book is part of my personal canon: I was there at my daughter Alisa's magic moment when she learned to read -- the book in her lap was THE CAT IN THE HAT.

As a child, I went on to read all the Dr. Seuss I could get my hands on, and I loved much of it, especially AND TO THINK THAT I SAW IT ON MULBERRY STREET and GREEN EGGS AND HAM (I thought HORTON HATCHES THE EGG was unbearably sad).

I loved, too, THE LORAX, and placed it in my canon because it is the first environmental picture book (or book) I read, and I read it aloud, over and over again, to my two oldest children, who especially loved it in the 1970s. It heavily influenced my thinking about the environment (so it changed my life) at a time when environmentalists (in a just-emerging field) were considered wackos by so many. I went back to the beginning, to see what I could see, and began to read the nature writers -- John Burroughs, John Muir, Edwin Way Teale (I loved THE COURAGE OF TURTLES), John McPhee, Hal Borland, Annie Dillard, Rachel Carson and more -- I have a collection of these books on my canon shelves, and I pull one to me now and then and read a section in it -- I am always transported to those days of intense nature reading. I can trace it back to THE LORAX and my curiosity. I can trace my interest in ecology and the environment to this book. To other things as well, of course... but we're talking books here.


I was a kid with an insatiable curiosity, so it's no surprise that I would gravitate to a set of encyclopedia-like books called THE BOOK OF KNOWLEDGE. These twenty books (with yearly updates in supplements) lined my father's office walls, and included a character education booklet and a "Graded Course of Study" that contained study outlines for every school subject -- geography, history, literature, biology and much more.



The index was in volume 20, so if I wanted to learn about, say, Pilgrims, I would look it up in volume 20, where I would be referred to all the articles on Pilgrims throughout the 20-volume set.

This set of books was a treasure trove for me. I spent hours just reading through it -- there was so much that was fascinating in those pages.



I'll end with another set of books that opened the world of literature to me as a child. These books also were in my father's "office," a book-lined room at home, where my dad payed bills and cut-and-spliced 8mm (or was it 16?) movie film from his home movies, and where he had a room of his own, full of the Time Life series of books on nature, and science -- all the Popular Mechanics series, and that BOOK OF KNOWLEDGE.

But the ones I'm remembering now as pivotal to my learning and becoming were big thick books of stories in THE JUNIOR CLASSICS, published by P.F. Collier in 1960. There were ten books, and I worked my way through most of them, reading "Stories About Boys and Girls," and "Stories of Wonder and Magic" and "Fairy Tales and Fables" and more... heroes, animals, sports, history, and an entire volume on poetry -- one of my earliest introductions to poetry. Every genre was there -- and I was steeped in story, Sunday after Sunday afternoon or summer day after summer day, lying on the bed reading from these volumes.

This was were I first saw Randolph Caldecott's work. He illustrated many of the stories in the "Fairy Tales and Fables" volume. I was struck by the color and detail and life in those paintings. This was were I began to really look at illustration, too -- the illustration of Prometheus bound to the rock in "Myths and Legends" was almost too much to bear (literally) -- he wore barely a loincloth and it blew in the wind. His muscles rippled. He reached out a hand in supplication. I wanted to help him. And something in me made me look away, too.

I got lost in the illustration in these books, in the line drawings in THE BOOK OF KNOWLEDGE, and in the Dr. Seuss as well -- I was getting an education in illustration and didn't know it. I was learning to appreciate different styles.


I was also developing my own voice, although I wouldn't have known that yet, either. I tell my students today that, in order to write well, one must READ. Read and read and read. Then read some more. Nothing prepared me for being a writer more than reading did.

And none of this was directed reading. I was reading for pure pleasure, and for knowledge because I wanted to KNOW -- it's one of Maslow's five basic human needs: to know and understand.

I wanted to be entertained, too. I was reading because it soothed me. And because, on a level I could not understand, reading was forming me -- it organized my mind and thoughts, it gave heft to my sensibilities, my desires, my personality, and my way of seeing. Reading would save my life -- I'll talk about this in future canon posts. Reading would dictate my future. It would refine what it meant to me, to be human in the world.

What are your first influences in books? Jerrod T. writes to say (after reading yesterday's post about canons), "Not everyone reads or is read to. Not everyone is a reader by nature. What about those people? Do they have personal canons?"

A canon in music, in nature, in food, in friends... there are many ways to define your life. For our purposes here, however, I'm interested in uncovering autobiography in books... why do you keep certain books on certain special shelves? What did they mean to you when you read them, and how have they informed your life and who you have become? Where have they taken you?

I hope you'll keep a notebook dedicated to these stories you uncover. They will spark all kinds of personal narrative, essays, memoir, fiction. Even if you never publish them, you will own your own story (no small feat)... and you can share your story with others.