EXCLUSIVE! Transcript of Katherine Paterson's Recent Speech at Dominican University-Butler Library
July 06, 2011
Katherine Paterson is the current National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. Visit the National Ambassador site here and find Katherine on Facebook.
Dominican University ~ April 6, 2011
HOW I BECAME A WRITER - Katherine Paterson
Okay, I'm 74 years old and a grandmother seven times over, so I get to repeat stories, right? Here it is: Five years ago this month I was awakened at 6 a.m. on the morning by a phone call from Sweden telling me that I was to be the 2006 winner of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. So from that morning until we actually left for Stockholm on the 26th of May, my five-year-old granddaughter could talk of nothing but the fact that she was going to meet a real princess. Her mother and I were a bit apprehensive. We knew that Crown Princess Victoria was slated to be at the award ceremonies, but we had no idea what the security measures would be, much less what the protocol was for meeting the future crowned head of Sweden. Jordan was busy practicing her curtsey, but when I asked Larry Lempert, the chair of the jury how I should greet the princess, he said, "Oh, give her a high five."
Needless to say, I sought other advice, and I was told simply to follow her lead. "She's very down to earth," everyone said. "She'll probably offer to shake hands." Which is exactly what she did.
The princess and I were comfortably seated in chairs in front of the audience a few minutes before the ceremony began. She was just as down to earth as all her subjects had promised me she would be, so I felt free to mention that my grandchildren were eager to meet her and to ask if that would be possible. "Of course," she said, "but why don't we wait for the photographers so they can have their pictures taken?"
I thought that was a great idea, but somehow, each of my seven grandchildren from ages 4 - 16 found he or she had something to say to their grandmother that couldn't possibly wait until after the ceremony. They all made their way down from their seats in the audience to speak to me, so, quite naturally, I had to introduce them to the princess who shook hands with each one, asked their names and greeted them all as cordially as if they had been a friendly diplomatic delegation.
Of course, when the paparazzi lined up to take pictures afterwards, my seven grandchildren were right there again to have themselves photographed with their old pal, her royal highness.
Jordan, especially, was thrilled. When the photography session ended, she asked her mother, "Now are we famous?" Samantha assured her she was. She skipped over to me and happily took my hand to walk to the restaurant on the grounds where the reception for all the famous people in attendance was being held.
When we went in, there on the table where guests were being checked in was the same picture of her grandmother that had been on the front page of the newspaper and posted on the stage and in various sites around the city. We started up the stairs and there at the top of the stairs was yet another picture of her grandmother-this one nearly the size of her own front door. She took one look, sighed deeply, and began to shake her head. "Nana. Nana. Nana," she said.
"Are you tired of Nana, Jordan?" I asked.
"Yes."
Well, who could blame her? Certainly not me. Grandmothers aren't supposed to be famous. Their job is to be proper grandmothers. And believe me, no one was more surprised than I by that telephone call at 6 a.m. .
Later that year my English editor of many years asked me if I had ever dreamed my life as a writer would turn out as it has. "I never dreamed that I would ever get published," I answered.
Actually, I never set out to be a writer in the first place. I have many friends who are very fine writers, and it seems to me that all of them knew by the time they were ten years old that they had been born to be writers. When I was ten years old I wasn't sure whether I wanted to be a missionary or a movie star.
It would be nice to be able to look back and see signs of early promise. Alas, you would search in vain. When I won my first literary prize at the age of 44, a friend, who had also lived in China and attended Shanghai American School during the time I was there, decided to look into her collection of school newspapers and see if I had written anything for the school paper. This is what she found and gleefully quoted to anyone she heard congratulate me for winning an award:
Pat, pat, pat.
There is the rat.
Where is the cat?
Pat, pat, pat.
Right beside this, my first published work, was a letter from my teacher, Miss Essie Shields, that read: "The second graders' work is not up to our usual standards this week. . . ." So my first published work was published alongside my first critical review, which, you will note, was not a rave.
Did I know when I was seven that I was going to be a writer? Of course not. Did anyone note that I was showing early promise of becoming a writer? Not a soul. And none of us including me would blame them one bit for failing to encourage me, based on what they read.
But something must have happened. Even I can tell that my work has improved over the last 70 years. So what did happen between the publication of "Pat, pat, pat" and being named the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature? I have a one word answer to that question. Reading.
It started before I was born. My mother was already in the habit of reading to my older brother and sister and, when I arrived, I was included in that magic time. I can still almost recite by heart:
James James
Morrison Morrison
Weatherby George Dupree
Took great care of his mother,
Though he was only three.
James James
Said to his Mother,
"Mother," he said, said he:
"You must never go down to the end of the town,
if you don't go down with me."
And, to my glee, peppered with a sprinkle of anxiety, it was the mother who proved to be the disobedient one, not the responsible three-year-old.
I could go on and on with my childhood delights which, when I had my own four children, I loved to re-read, five of us gathered on the double bed-Lin and Mary on each side of me and John and David at either end so they couldn't poke each other. In addition to my childhood favorites, there were new, quite wonderful books available by then. I can't remember how many times we read Charlotte's Web on that bed, but I do know that each time we approached the end, John would say: "Don't cry, Mom. You ruin it when you cry." But of course by the time we got to page 78 I was weeping uncontrollably and would have to hand the book over for a child to finish.
Between those two scenes of mothers' reading, there were the years when I read on my own. Because I moved so often and was thought in each new location to be quite strange to my classmates, often my closest friends during my school years were the ones I met between the covers of books. The friends I found in books not only helped me to understand myself better, they made it possible for me to come to understand and reach out to others. I remember how comforted I was, reading The Secret Garden. Here was another child in exile from the land in which she had been born. Mary Lennox was so like me. She was terribly lonely and had a fearful temper, but imperfect and unlovable as she was, she was given the key to a secret garden. When I am asked what my goal as a writer might be, my answer is this: I want to write a book that will do for a child what The Secret Garden did for me nearly seventy years ago.
I once read a speech by a fine writer who said that the thing that qualified her to be a writer for children was her photographic memory of childhood. I don't have a photographic memory of any event of my childhood. Indeed, many events of my childhood are lost or blurred. But I do have, I think, a good emotional memory. I remember not so much the details of the events themselves, but how they felt to me. I remember how it felt to cuddle up to my mother while she read to me and then how it felt to be displaced on my mother's lap, by not one, but two baby sisters in rapid succession. I remember the feel of my small hand in my father's huge one, and how I to it felt to hug his artificial leg. I remember how it felt to cower behind the blackout curtains in the living room and listen to the roar of enemy planes overhead. Later I remember how it felt to see screaming soldiers, bayonets fixed come racing toward me while practicing maneuvers across our front yard, and how it felt when enemy officers came to the house to question my parents and drink the tea my mother prepared for all her visitors.
There is one story from my childhood that I both remember and was told, so that I probably cannot disentangle the two. It was January of 1938. The war between China and Japan had begun in earnest the previous summer. We had been caught in the mountains on vacation, and with battles raging, only my father was allowed to go home. After five frightening months of air raids, news of battles and atrocities, not knowing what was happening to our beloved father, he finally returned. In late January we began our journey out of China. For vacationers, whether Chinese or foreign, there was only one way to get up or down the thousands of stone steps that were the path to the top of the mountain. You rode in a sedan chair carried by two strong bearers. But this trip was only made in summer time. It was January by now and the thousands of steps dug into the edge of the mountain were coated with ice. It was only the sure-footed skill of those carriers that got all the stranded vacationers down that precipitous route without a tragedy. No one breathed easily until all the chairs were safely at the foot of the mountain. There the foreigners, my family among them, caught a river steamer to take us to the city of Hangzhou where we boarded a specially designated train covered with large Red Crosses.
We traveled from Central China all the way south to British ruled Hong Kong. The seven of us had spent nearly a week on the evacuation train, crowded into a single sleeping compartment where we both ate and slept. My sister Helen was not quite two and baby Anne was less than five months old. The British authorities had no idea what to do with this trainload of foreign refugees, so while the fathers had gone out to scour the crowded city for reasonably priced shelter for their families we sat on our luggage in the vast lobby of the Peninsula Hotel which was then and may still be the grandest of all Hong Kong's grand hotels. Naturally, the British, European and American tourists who had paid hundreds of pounds for the privilege of staying in the Peninsula were appalled and offended by this filthy lot of women and children who were cluttering up their elegant lobby.
My mother, who was not a bitter woman, could not recall that day without bitterness. "I watched them as they passed by with sneers on their faces and I wanted to cry out to them: 'Do you think I like being here? Do you think I want my children to be dirty?'" She would shake her head. "They couldn't even smile at the baby," she said. "What kind of person can't even smile at a baby?" And she would always end this story by saying, "I can never see a picture of refugees in the paper without remembering how it feels."
I was only five, but the years since have not cured me of the memory of how it feels. I hope they never do. If you need an explanation of why I write the kind of books that I do, perhaps it is found, at least in part, in the lobby of the Peninsula Hotel. I never want to forget that child. I want to keep her a part of all I write and do. I am sure the Peninsula Hotel played a large part in my latest novel, The Day of the Pelican, a story of a family driven by war to relocate in an alien land.
After a year in the United States, we went back to China only to be evacuated a second time at the end of 1940. We returned once again to the land my parents called home. I was frightened by the war, and I wanted America to be my home. But America was not my home. It was a foreign country to me. Both times when I came to the States I seemed quite as alien to my classmates as they did to me. They made fun of my clothes, my accent, and the country I loved best. I realize that the seeds of some of my best writing go back to those unhappy days in the fourth grade at Calvin H. Wiley Elementary School, but I can't recall once saying to my forlorn little self, "Buck up, Old Girl, someday you're going to make a mint out of all this misery."
While the Calvin H. Wiley School's classrooms and playground were places of terror for me, the school library was my sanctuary. If at first I had no friends, the librarian gave me hundreds of friends living in the books on the library shelves. My book friends never made fun of me, never bullied me. They gently helped me to understand myself. They also helped me to become more understanding of other people and even other creatures. In the books I read I made friends with mice and dolls and deer and with children from different centuries and different lands. How, at the height of the Cold War, could I despise the Russian people? I had made friends with Soviet children through books I had read as a child.
And isn't this one of the miracles that books can perform? They can bind us intimately to other persons in a way we cannot hope to be bound in ordinary human life. Books allow us to eavesdrop on another person's soul.
I have always thought of myself as more of a reader than a writer. I can't remember learning how to read anymore than I can remember learning how to talk. I feel as though I've always been a reader. I learned how to write by reading. That is why when young people ask me for advice on becoming a writer, I answer "Read. Read. Read." It was in reading that I learned how language works, how plot and character and theme work together-indeed, I learned how I work and how the world works, largely by reading. That is why I want children and young people to read-not so that they will all become writers but so that they will learn how to live as intelligent, compassionate citizens of the world.
Let me tell you a story about a friend of mine. I'm going to call my friend Walter, though that is not his real name. Walter began life in a family of modest means in a city on the East Coast- father, mother, then two younger brothers. Walter, a lively child, was less than enchanted with school, but somehow he scraped through the boring days, with a minimum of effort. Life may not have been wonderful for Walter, but it was okay, it was normal. Then suddenly, one day, Walter's life turned upside down. His father walked out, leaving his mother with no money and three small boys to care for.
It was a time when the job market was flooded with veterans returning from World War II. Women who had worked to support the war effort, left their jobs and went home to be the perfect housewives. But Walter's mother had to go to work. There was of course no child care system in place- proper stay-at-home mothers didn't require it. Nor was there any government effort in place to track down dead beat fathers and force them to pay child support.
It isn't hard to imagine what Walter's mother went through, working at whatever jobs she could find, worrying all day about what her three little boys were doing, worrying all night about how she was going to feed them and clothe them and keep a roof over their heads.
As summer approached her worry increased. Even though the city streets might have been less dangerous in the fifties than they have become, she was a good and caring mother who didn't want her children running loose all day long. So when she heard about a farm out from town where the farmer took children in for the summer to give them three months of fresh air and good food at no cost- oh, the children would be expected to help out with the chores, but they'd want to, wouldn't they? - when she heard about this opportunity, she jumped at the chance. As soon as school was out, Walter and his two little brothers went to spend an idyllic summer in the country.
You are already smelling trouble. The farmer was a stern taskmaster. He expected the children to work and work very hard. Quite soon Walter's lively, not to say rebellious nature, landed him in trouble. Punishment was called for. And punishment, the farmer decreed, was to be locked up alone in the attic of the old farmhouse. Now we imagine an angry, homesick, apprehensive child climbing the dark staircase, hearing the door at the bottom slam shut and the key turn in the lock.
It is summer, so there is still a little light coming from the small window. I don't know if Walter is crying, if he is, it is probably tears of anger, but eventually, like any prisoner, he begins to look about his prison. And he sees that he is not alone. The farmer has also exiled to the attic Charles Dickens and Jane Austen, Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson, Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Milton. Walter takes down a dusty volume, carries it to the window and begins to read.
During the rest of that otherwise dreadful summer, Walter contrived to get himself punished on a regular basis. But by the next time he was exiled to the attic he had managed to secure a flashlight for himself, so that his reading would not have to stop when the sun set.
He went back to the city and to school. School continued to bore him, and he was never more than an indifferent student. Yet at the same time his teachers were writing him off, Walter was hungrily reading everything he could get his hands on. During those nights in that attic, the world had opened up for him. He had learned that books could stretch his mind and heart as nothing else and no one else had ever done before. He could not get enough.
Those in authority were surprised when Walter, who had exhibited no academic ambition in high school, opted to take the Scholastic Aptitude Tests. When the SATS scores came out, Walter was called into the office. He must have cheated. There was no other explanation for his phenomenal score. He would have to take the test again, but this time he would be doing so under carefully monitored conditions. Walter repeated the tests with a teacher standing over his shoulder and again pulled down an astounding score.
Walter graduated from college and took a Masters Degree in Business from Harvard University. He became an innovative and successful businessman, and, more importantly, a devoted husband, father and grandfather-a man, not only of intelligence, but of wisdom, compassion and delightful good humor. Despite a full and busy life, Walter still reads widely and voraciously.
Now imagine for me an alternative scenerio. Walter climbs the stairs to the attic and finds neatly stacked by the window a dozen booklets of standardized tests and two nicely sharpened number two pencils. Even if, out of boredom, he had scribbled in every likely slot, would those tests have enlarged his mind and spirit the way those books did? Or fast forward to our time, suppose he had found there a computer with a speedy internet connection, yes, he might have learned more about the world outside that attic, but he might also have found dark sites persuading him that violence was the way to deal with the hurt and anger in his young soul.
I'm very grateful there were books in Walter's attic, because as his wife says, "Books saved him."
. I think the thing I love most about being a writer is that it brings you readers-readers who can take your simple story and turn it into something quite wonderful. I want to tell you about one of them who brought beauty to a homely little story of mine.
It all began with a letter I received in November of 2004. The letter had been mailed the August before. It had no stamp and the return address was an APO box number. Now I am a peace loving children's writer, so most of my mail comes from children, not soldiers. But as I read this letter, I was, as any writer would be, overwhelmed with gratitude.
Dear Ms. Paterson,
I apologize for not typing this letter, but I send you greetings from Farah City, Afghanistan where I am deployed with my Army National Guard unit in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. I am, consequently, without access to printers.
Yesterday, we were blessed with the very rare occasion of receiving mail at our remote desert outpost. With my letters was a copy of Bridge to Terabithia. I was unfamiliar with this book but the title sounded interesting and it had clearly won the Newbery, so I gave it a try. And on one of those very rare occasions where I have time between missions and guard duty, I read the entire novel.
I was mesmerized. You wrote an absolutely beautiful novel and I, like Jessie Aarons, fell in love with Leslie Burke. Maybe it was because you made it so easy to see things from Jessie's perspective. Maybe it was because Leslie reminded me of a girl I once knew. Maybe it was because she was a spark of beauty in a land and a war where beauty is of so little importance.
That night, after finishing Bridge to Terabithia, my squad left our compound for a mission. Yet, even while I drove through a strange foreign city with body armor and a fully loaded M-16 assault rifle, all I could think about was the beauty and richness of your novel.
Before the army yanked me out of the real world for this war, I was a high school English teacher. Before that I studied English at the University of Iowa. I have, therefore, read many novels. But of all those novels I have awarded only five books with my own personal five star rating system. Bridge to Terabithia is unquestionably a five star novel. It amazed me for its beauty.
Thank you, Ms. Paterson, for bringing such joy to this lonely teacher-made-soldier in this long tour in this bleak desert country. I have sent instructions home to my wife, asking her to secure a hardcover, and my future students will be highly encouraged to read your brilliant novel.
Once again, thank you for the joy you brought me. Thank you for Leslie Burke.
Sincerely,
Corporal Trent D. Reedy
United States Army
Because I don't want you to spend the rest of the evening worrying about whether Trent Reedy got home safely from Afghanistan, I want you to assure you that he did. We have moved on from letter writing to friendship and he has since received his MFA in writing for children and young adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. I am also thrilled to be able to tell you that this past January Arthur Levine Books published, Words in the Dust, Trent's first novel inspired by a little Afghan girl he met not long after he wrote that letter to me. And we just learned a couple of weeks ago that Al Roker has chosen Words in the Dust as the next selection for the Today Show children's book club. That lonely reader has now turned into a fine writer.
Reading surely turned me into a writer, but, more importantly, it has enriched and challenged my life, so I want to use my time and voice these two years as ambassador to urge every young person I speak to and anyone who has anything to do with the young, to take time away from your busy lives and electronic tools and toys to read. I have yet to meet the person who has tweeted her way to wisdom.
Read for your life as a member of a family, as part of a community, as a citizen of both this country and a citizen of the world. Expand and enrich your life by reading aloud within the family and the classroom. Read about people who are different from you and about ideas that are foreign to your own. Think about what you read and discuss it with other people in your life. Listen with respect to others' opinions and thoughtfully examine your own. I have yet to meet a person who has tweeted his or her way to wisdom. Read for knowledge and understanding and for delight as Walter did. Read for consolation and comfort as I did. Read for your life as Trent Reedy did.
In her book entitled, How to Read a Novel, Caroline Gordon maintains that a great book is a conversion experience. You may not feel yourself the same person afterwards as you did before. It is even possible that other people might notice the change, she says. I know books that have done that for me.
One final story. The summer that I was sixteen years old I, who was born in China, was rooming with a friend, who was born in Africa. One night after the long day of waitressing was over, Mary began to read aloud to me Alan Paton's novel, Cry, the Beloved Country. At first it was just the sound of Mary's Africa haunted voice caressing the beauty of Paton's language that kept me wide awake and enthralled. But gradually, chapter by chapter, that beauty told me of the unspeakable oppression and tragedy that was South Africa's story for too many years. I'm not sure exactly when it happened. The reading was done, I know that much, but suddenly one night the book came alive for me in a new way. I saw for the first time that the tragedy of South Africa was the tragedy of the American South where I lived and where I had been blind to the oppression from which I as a white person had been exempt. I began to cry, sob rather, for my own thoughtless sins and the sins of my people.
I look back on those tears as a turning point in my young life. I did not leave all my sins and fears behind on that wet pillow, but I know my life began to change that night because of a book.
But someone must find the book that might just change a child or young person's life. And that is the task of all of us here tonight-teachers, librarians, parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts-in my case it was a friend. In Trent Reedy's case, it was his wife.
I was once asked to speak to a group of public school teachers who would be taking their classes to see a production of the play, Bridge to Terabithia. I spent more than an hour telling about how the book came to be written and rewritten and then how Stephanie Tolan and I adapted it into the play their classes would see. There was the usual time of questions, at the end of which a young male teacher thanked me for my time and what I had told them that morning. "But I want to take something special back to my class. Can you give me some word to take back to them?"
I was momentarily silenced. After all I had been talking continuously for over an hour, surely he could pick out from that outpouring a word or two to take home to his students. Fortunately, I kept my mouth shut long enough to realize what I ought to say-
"I'm very Biblically oriented," I said, "and so for me the most important thing is for the word to become flesh. I can write stories for children and young people, and in that sense I can offer them words, but you are the word become flesh in your classroom. Society has taught our children that they are nobodies unless their faces appear on television. But by your caring, by your showing them how important each one of them is, you become the word that I would like to share with each of them. You are that word become flesh."
If you ask me what message a book of mine contains, I'll get testy, but that doesn't mean I have nothing I want to say to my readers. What I want to say to isolated, angry, fearful youth- to all the children who feel that their lives are worthless in the eyes of the world: you are seen, you are not alone, you are not despised, you are unique and of infinite value in the human family. When I do so, I am reaching back into the story of my own life, remembering the times when I was isolated, angry, fearful and feeling despised and left out.
One day in a Vermont prison one of the inmates asked: "Do you think Gilly would have made it if there had been no Maime Trotter?"
"I don't know," I said, "I just don't know."
But I do know that unless there is someone who cares, most children will never make it. As a writer, I can try to offer children healing and illumination through the words of a story, but I can't stop there, thinking that my task is done. Nor, I dare say, can you. It is up to each of us to who come into contact with these children to embody that hope-to be their Maime Trotters-it is up to each one of us to be their word of hope made flesh.