public events: chattanooga, tn and darien, ct

Quickly, two public events where we can meet one another and catch up:

I'm speaking tonight (Monday, March 28) at 6:30 at the downtown branch of the public library in Chattanooga, Tennessee, a town I adore. Details here.

I'll be talking about how personal narrative finds its way into fiction, using my books as a backdrop for so many stories that have defined my life and my work. This is a family program for all ages.  More here.

On Tuesday, I'll be working in Chattanooga schools. Yay!

Then, I'm speaking on March 31 -- this Thursday -- at the Darien Library in Darien, Connecticut, a town I'm about to meet and, I'm sure, adore. Details here. Countdown is Darien's "One Book, One Community" book for 2011!Exciting!  It's the first children's book to be selected for this honor, and I'm so looking forward to meeting the folks in Darien and sharing stories.

Darien has planned a month-long celebration of Countdown at the library, complete with a film screening of Thirteen Days and Dr. Strangelove, as well as Pete Seeger's The Power of Song, which is one of the many references I used in researching the Pete Seeger biography for Countdown. There will be listening parties, a poetry slam, and so much more -- check it out!

I'll be doing a writing workshop with young writers in Darien on March 31 at 4pm, and a family program about Countdown that evening at the library, at 7pm.

If you live near Chattanooga or Darien, I hope you'll come say hey. Heavens to Murgatroyd! as Franny Chapman says in Countdown. Two public events in one week! I'd love to see you.

the wheel turns

It was my luck to have spring and summer babies. If I'd had them in fall and winter, I'd tell you that was my luck, too. It's good luck to have babies, no matter what season, no matter what age. And, this spring, my youngest babe turns 25. Yesterday was her birthday.

So of course we celebrated. Someone wrote her a song... years ago actually, but now it is recorded. And framed. 

I wanted to include family who couldn't be with us on this day. If they'd had the chance, or if they were still living, they would have come to our little house to celebrate. Life is so short, isn't it? 

So I pulled out the Trabuco Canyon honey I bought when we last visited Zach in California. I took the marmalade jar from its special spot -- it belonged to my mother-in-law for so long, and before that to her mother -- and filled it with confectioner's sugar. I put two sticks of butter into the butter dish that had been my grandmother's -- the real Miss Eula -- and imagined my father, as a boy, helping himself to some hand-churned butter from that dish.

I used the Georges Briard cake pedestal that Hannah and I found at our local antique store. I put a carrot cake on it, and frosted it with cream cheese frosting. My mother always wrote on our childhood birthday cakes, but I opted for big numbers for a big birthday, as I no longer have children at home living out their childhoods.

I did, however, buy butter pecan ice cream, which was my mother's favorite. Hannah had no preferences for this birthday meal or cake, which left me free to remember our collective past in calling up this meal and those who now loved or had loved us. I loved doing this. 

You can see a bit of Albert Einstein, a painting by artist and friend Kate Fortin, in the chair behind the cake... not that Albert is a relative, but he's family of choice, I suppose, and certainly Kate is. You also can't see the family photos that grace the bookshelves, but they are there, lending their presence to the preparations.

So I set the table with the china my mother had given me. For flower vases, I used the blue bottles I had scavenged with Jason long ago.

I brought my mother's candy dish into the dining room (this room was my office until recently... more on that soon!). And I reverently put on the sideboard Hannah's other grandmother's little dish that she had given me before she died -- oh, how Juanita would have loved to have seen Hannah turn 25. How she had loved that child!

Our birthday dinner? Waffles and bacon! For many years, we made our big meal of the day in the afternoon on Sundays, and then made waffles and bacon for supper. I have fond memories of Hannah and I measuring and stirring while the bacon popped and we discussed the important events of middle school, while Zena, Warrior Princess whooped it up on television nearby. Ha!

Jason and Stephanie brought fried chicken. We joked about chicken and waffles while we poured the orange juice and took the biscuits out of the oven and started buttering them. Hannah put herself in charge of watching the waffles. Jim scrambled some eggs.

We had little cottage industries going on everywhere in the kitchen. There wasn't a green vegetable in sight... and wasn't that just like a perfect childhood Hannah meal? Why, yes, it was.

Someone's second helping. We won't say whose, but we are proud of the industry!

And then it was time to blow out the candles on the cake.

Meanwhile, someone ELSE flitted from window to window, flirting with the outside cat. Can you believe how much he's grown?

Into the evening, there was talk of birthdays past and birthdays to come. Look carefully and you will see that we are about to welcome another little girl into our family. Abigail Grace will make her appearance any day now, as soon as she says it's time. And look: she is already surrounded by family. Family of choice, family of chance, family from near, family from far, and family from long ago as well. She is already part of history. She is already part of our storytelling.

I love our stories. I love what it means to be family. It's like Uncle Edisto says in Little Bird: "Open your arms to life! Let it strut into your heart, with all it's messy glory!"

Which, to me, means laughing and celebrating, and also struggling and figuring it out, and giving each other lots of space to find our ways, both together and separately. It means coming together, again and again, with a whole lot of history and willingness and forgiveness and grace. Grace. It's a whole lotta grace that keeps us together as well. Grace that leads to peace.

Peace to you and your families this spring. Peace to our family, as Hannah enters her 26th year, as Abbie enters her first, and as each of us, in all our stages of messy glory, finds ways to celebrate who we are. May we always find joy in the continual, changing, amazing discovery of one another.

Shanti, shanti, shanti. Peace, peace, peace.

stalking the personal narrative

Thanks to librarian Laura Godshall at Robert E. Lee Elementary School in Spotsylvania, Virginia, for taking these photos of students working with me yesterday. We're listening, talking, sharing, and gathering the stuff of personal narratives. Excellent.

Because Laura had done such a stellar job of preparing her students, they were eager to greet me, they were excited about the work ahead, and they were invested. Totally invested.What a pleasure! What a delight.

Because all students in grades K through 5 had all heard my books read out loud, had kept readers' journals as they listened and discussed, and had read some titles on their own, we were able, in workshop after workshop, to move at a steady clip, as students made connections right and left to my stories, made text-to-self and self-to-world connections, and scribbled like mad in their notebooks or did finger-writing with me.

They were attentive, engaged listeners. I had lots of stories to tell, all about how my life turns into my fiction.

Great writers stop and think a lot.

"A story is told in a circle..."

Good singers! A story is often told in song...

Sometimes good fortune and hard work intersect. It's a gift. Thank you to everyone at R.E. Lee Elementary School for a most-fabulous teaching, learning, story-celebrating day. It was a privilege to become a member of your reading and writing community.

in love

This is Ben. Ben is six. Ben ate lunch with me and 11 other students at Robt. E. Lee Elementary School today. Ben made a bee line for me when he walked into the library carrying his green cafeteria tray on which sat a chicken sandwich, some broccoli, and a carton of chocolate milk. He sat smack dab next to me all during lunch. He was a good conversationalist. He has a dog named Ranger.

Ben wrote me a letter. It's illustrated, in color, and features a tree, a sun, and stick figures of me and Ben standing together. I am the tall one. He is the one with glasses.

Ben's very neatly written letter read, "I want to have lunch whith you becueas I like your books and I like you."

I like Ben. He's going to work for NASA when he grows up. That's what he told me. I believe him.

work and play at brent subic

So I went back to work. My second week in the Philippines was spent at Brent International School's Subic Bay campus, which holds classes in the old naval base elementary school. Students had prepared for my visit.

Writing with third graders

Finding fourth-grader Ramon in the library later in the week. "I'm the first person to check out Countdown!" Great, Ramon! "What'cha reading right now?"

Wowee. Ramon's teacher later told me Ramon has checked Hugo Cabret out of the library over and over again. He was so proud to be sitting in the middle school library reading, instead of in the lower school library. "I like the books here," he said. You go, Ramon.

First and second graders get ready to sing the song Jim wrote that accompanies One Wide Sky. It was fabulous!

Heading out of the Subic compound and into the city of Olangapo with librarians Angelo Fernandez and Rose Austria.

our jeepney! I sat right up front behind the passenger seat and forked over my fare.

The public market in Olongapo.

Our chariot home. Ghelo will sit behind the driver.

 Thanks for the ride!

I'm working at Robert E. Lee Elementary School in Spotsylvania, Virginia today. No jeepneys, no trikes, no steamy tropical heat. But we will be singing One Wide Sky in kindergarten and first grade.

In the upper elementary grades we will be talk about Ruby and Comfort and House Jackson and Mississippi and "what's your story?"

Kids will bring notebooks and we'll begin the working of writing our stories. I will carry the memories of the Philippines with me, all those amazing students, all those fabulous teachers, all those teaching and learning moments, both in the classroom and out.

Thank you so much to everyone who worked so hard to bring me to the Philippines. I will never forget your hard work and kindnesses. I will always treasure the people and experiences I had there, both as a young girl and a grown woman.  The past informs the present. It tells us who we are.

Everything is story material. Story is everything. And now I am home, and in Virginia. I'm very glad to be here. Off I go.

the homesick weekend

I didn't think I could go back to Clark. It had made me too sad. In fact, the Philippines was filling me with grief. I spent the weekend at a lovely resort-type place on Subic, all by myself, crying about the poverty I had seen all week long outside the compounds where I lived and worked, railing against the effects of long-term colonialism in the Philippines, grieving for a past I never made peace with, and journaling long into the night.

 I was confused by what I didn't understand, and I was exhausted from the work week, from the jet-lag, and from the homesickness. Homesick for my parents who died seven years ago. Homesick for who we all were, for that time in our lives. Heartsick about Clark and wondering how memory and time works on the heart. Homesick for a sense of comfortability and safety in a country with infrastructure and without armed guards at checkpoints along the roadways and at entrances to private compounds everywhere.

And yet, even in the midst of the noise and dirt and poverty and pollution of the cities, there was such beauty and amazement -- and a rainforest. It was like whiplash to be here.

I didn't think I could go back to Clark. But as I journeled in my notebook, and as Sunday's quiet, still, beautiful day worked its magic on me, I got some perspective, and on Monday, as Rose Austria, the lower school librarian at Brent Subic, picked me up with driver Jay, I said, "let's go," and we went back to see what we could see.

We left the parade ground and drove up to hill housing again, where Rose worked her magic and a supervisor was called, and we were allowed to go through the gate, as long as we left the car and walked the whole way, which we did.

Colonel's families lived here for years and years. Now it's going back to jungle, and there are only ghosts. The guards passed us on motorbikes now and then, and some walked with us, unsure of us at first, but then trying to help me find my house. I knew where it was.

 Jay and one of the Negrito guards made a path for us.

I told the story of how I stood under that overhang at night with a boyfriend delivering me home after a date, how I kissed him goodnight at the front door, and how my father watched us from the bathroom window. They all laughed.

Below, the overhang with bathroom window on left, and front door next to that. i was kissed there. I am mulling and mulling now, about the changes that time brings, and what it means to memory. Of course, that is a big part of the thinking behind my fiction as well. I know this trip will inform my work. And my heart.

Everyone was willing to be in the pictures now. We celebrated finding the house.

By now we were friends. (That's librarian Rose on the right.) I rode down the hill on the back of a guard's motorcycle -- really! --  and then we were invited for lunch. What a rare gift.

Rice spread on banana leaves, fish soup, and adobo.  Below: where lunch was cooked, on an open fire at the back of the nipa hut/guard house:

Time to say goodbye. The man wearing the goggle-glasses built the hut. He is also a pastor.

What a difference a day makes. I left Clark having made friends and having found the place where I'd lived for that pivotal senior year in high school. Time has changed everything. Is that not time's purpose? I don't know. I know that I felt better. I had Rose and Jay and a lifetime of memories in the car with me as we drove the hour back to Subic and the room that would be my home for the next week.

We drove past a river that had been completely destroyed as the lava flow from Pinatubo sucked up its water twenty years ago. We drove past rice fields in various stages of cultivation/harvest. We had left behind the paper shacks of Manila and the poverty in Angeles and Pampanga and we drove toward Subic Bay.

Earlier in the week I had been talking with Westerners about my ambivalent feelings about Westerners' history in the Philippines and what had developed as a result. A new friend said, "The Philippines will break your heart, if you don't learn how to live here and give back in a meaningful way."

 I spoke with a Filipino in Manila, about the same thing. He had said, "I like the Americans being here. There is such danger here, which is why you see guards at checkpoints and private roads and so much security -- there are car-nappers, kidnapping, there are gangs, there is much to be afraid of... and you are right, there is little infrastructure. There is so much poverty. I like the American presence. It tempers the dangers..."

And so I thought about Clark -- and now, Subic. Had it been a good thing that the Americans had been such a strong presence in the Philippines? It seemed so, and yet it also was such a complex thing -- it was impossible to answer it in black and white terms.

 So I journaled through my ignorance and asked my questions and wondered if I would ever become clear. And then, I began my work at Brent Subic. One thing I was sure of: this experience was changing my life.