EXCLUSIVE: Katherine Paterson's Remarks from the National Book Festival Gala
September 28, 2011
Katherine Paterson's Remarks
National Book Festival Gala - Friday, September 23, 2011
I don’t know about you all, but when the information for this year’s festival went up on the website, I immediately turned to the author section to see what they’d said about me, and I was a bit alarmed to see just how many times I’ve come to this festival. Since I know the Library of Congress has a policy of not asking the same authors back too often, I’m terrified that the powers-that-be will wake up and realize just how often I’ve been here during this ten year span and never invite me again. And I, like many of us here tonight, truly love to come to this festival.
In case any of those in charge of the invitation lists are out there tonight, I want them to recall for several of those years that I’ve been more a part of the chorus than a solo artist. Indeed, that was the situation at the very first festival. John Cole at the Center for the Book had suggested that the National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance do a 10 am presentation in this very auditorium. We had a lively, not to say, hilarious panel of children’s authors and illustrators, an overflow audience, and a great inaugural festival, little dreaming that three short days later the world would turn upside down.
But the festival has not only endured, it has flourished. In 2008 the National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance, or the NCBLA, or Nickbla to those of us really on the inside, was invited to introduce OUR WHITE HOUSE: LOOKING IN LOOKING OUT, our book that featured the work of more than 108 writers and illustrators with an introduction by our hero historian, David McCullough.
We wanted children and young people and their parents and teachers to see the history of our wonderful country through the lives of those who have lived or worked in that house down the street. And we wanted to do it in a format that would both inform and delight. It took eight years to pull it all together, but the NCBLA has, I believe, the most imaginative, energetic, determined and just plain stubborn chief executive of any non-profit in America. Mary Brigid Barrett is here tonight. She’s very short, so I need to ask her to stand up so you can all see her.
After OUR WHITE HOUSE was published to rave reviews, Mary Brigid did not rest on our collective laurels. She and John Cole and the amazing team at the Center for Book put their heads together to figure out a way to lure young readers to the read.gov website and from that site on into the wild and wonderful world of reading actual books. Well, build a crazy story and they will come. They came by the hundreds of thousands from all over the world to read what was called THE EXQUISITE CORPSE ADVENTURE. This time only twenty writers and illustrators for young people were involved. A writer would write a chapter, then pass it along for another writer to pick up the story--you probably remember some version of this game. And it is a game and so it should be great fun. For those of you in the cutthroat world of publishing for old people, we like to say that in children’s books we’re one big happy family, none of us out to outdo/ or undo/ or do in a fellow writer. Well, when one of your colleagues hands you a chapter that would make the Perils of Pauline look like Goodnight Moon, you do began to wonder.
The Stinky Cheese Man, Jon Sceiszka, more formally known as America’s first National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, was recruited to write the first chapter. If you know Jon you realize that he literally handed the writer of chapter two a literary bomb with a short, lighted fuse. Since I was that writer, my job was simply to keep the heroes, Nancy and Joe, alive. After all there were 25 more installments and a year to go.
A new chapter was posted every two weeks on the read.gov website. And lest you fear that the crazy adventure of Joe and Nancy was all there was to this project, I hope you’ll take time to look at the educational materials for teachers and librarians posted on the NCBLA website. There you’ll find with each chapter an annotated bibliography of related books as well as amazing educational materials from lessons in art history to brain stretching games and activities. All of which were used by thousands of teachers whose classes were reading the Exquisite Corpse Adventure.
The final chapter was to be written by the next ambassador, and so last year, as the second ambassador, it was my job to wrap all the craziness of the year in a neat package that had its climax at last year’s book festival. And now the story has become the book that the NCBLA is launching tomorrow . . . So here I am again. Come to the Children’s Pavilion at 10 tomorrow, if you want to know what happens to Joe and Nancy, and we’ll tell you, well, sort of tell you. After all we want you to buy and read the book. It’s too late to get it for free on the read.gov website.
I will be winding up my tenure as the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature at the end of this year. And I want to thank Dr. Billington, the Center for the Book and the Children’s Book Council for giving me this marvelous experience. I’m already envying my successor.
Among my adventures was finding myself a prize in a national contest. Educators were invited to say how they would use a visit from the National Ambassador to promote literacy in their school and community. The prize was won for a tiny school in Sebago, Maine by their first grade teacher, Dawn Bonavie. A friend and I drove through a blizzard in the White Mountains of New Hampshire to get to Sebago, but it was worth it. To introduce the day, Dawn explained that since she was shy, she needed friends to help her. She went over to the piano and picked up four books. “These were some of my best friends when I was growing up,” she said. The first was a nearly worn out Little Golden Book. Dawn’s mother would take her and her brother when she went grocery shopping, and each week the children could take a turn selecting a book. They were to share the books and then one week the book would belong to her and the next to her brother. “But,” she said holding up the book, “I must not have learned how to share, because, see, I’ve scratched out my brother’s name and written Dawn.” So sharing was a work in progress.
Then she held up Little House in the Big Woods, a book that taught her how people lived years ago and showed a shy child how good it was to be strong and independent. The third was a story book about Japan that made her long to go to Japan and to learn about the world outside her small home town. The last book was a book I had written: Jacob Have I Loved. “This book,” she said, “helped me understand how I felt because I was Louise. My mother saw how much I loved this book, and so she read it, and to my surprise, she thought she was Caroline. So I learned that two people can read the same book and learn very different things.”
My theme as ambassador has been “Read for your life.” And Dawn in her introduction exemplified that theme—Read for fun, read for information, read in order to understand yourself and other people with quite different ideas. Learn about the world beyond your door. Learn to be compassionate and grow in wisdom. Books can help us in all these ways. I have yet to meet the person who has texted his way to compassion or tweeted her way to wisdom—qualities we must all acquire or democracy will not survive.
At a middle school I visited this spring there was a sign on the library door that said: “Libraries are the second defense of freedom. Reading is the first.” To which I can only say, “Amen.”