Daffodils

     Botanists introduce order and certainty into our lives. Yes, let’s order everything into a kingdom, genus, species, tribe. Let’s give everything a Latin name. Let’s decide if things are opposite or alternating, palmate, oval, serrated, or smooth.

     Daffodils are of the plant kingdom. They are Angiosperms. Monocots.  Asparagales. Amaryllidacaea, Narcisseae, Narcissus. 

     I recently went to the glass flower collection at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Beginning in 1886, over three thousand flowers made of glass were created by Leopold Blaschka and his son Leopold. The flowers are anatomically correct. A botany professor needed to be able to show his students life-like representatives of plants that didn’t wither . Or in some prescient way, did people know that we humans might eventually destroy living things?

     O daffodil, so yellow, the very essence of yellow, the very essence of spring, of poetry, of cheerfulness breaking into the sodden sameness of March. All right for Andrew Wyeth to like his November/March palette, his straw-covered fields, but I, for one, enjoy the bright yellow of daffodils.

     Botanical ordering doesn’t get at the daffodil’s yellowness, the hope in its fragrance, or the way light shines through its tender yellow trumpet.

    Come, March, march forward and bring us daffodils.

Japan

The New York Times today has an op-ed piece about the earthquake and the problems with the nuclear plants. It's a haunting piece and worth reading: "Memories, Washed Away", by Marie Mutsuki Mockett. Among other things,  what is going on right now must be a traumatic reminder of the bombs dropped in 1945.


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/opinion/15marie.html?hp

Books in Concord, MA

On Friday I met a childhood friend in Concord, Massachusetts and then went to a reading and signing by Holly Thompson at the Concord Bookstore. The ghosts of Emerson, Alcott, and Thoreau sat down with us on the little white folding chairs to listen to Holly read from her new verse young adult novel called Orchards. Holly lives in Japan, south of Tokyo. It was the day of the earthquake, and she had learned, at least, that her husband was all right. Holly has a wonderful presence and reading voice. The novel is about a teenage girl who is sent off to spend time with her Japanese grandparents in order to help her make sense of the suicide of a friend. If you have read Ash, you know that Holly is able to get inside her characters and write about difficult subjects in a nuanced way. Holly has a great website: http://www.hatbooks.com

First Lines

The other night I woke up with a phrase running through my head. It was, “Margaret stepped across the threshold looking up at the stars.”

Last night the phrase was, “I heard the sound of a flute float across the bog.” 

BOG? I must have bogs on my mind.Maybe this blog should be called The Bogs of Fortune (see March 6)

I am not sleeping very soundly because these phrases keep running through my mind. It’s a voice, actually, reciting the phrases. I’ve noticed the voice is somewhat formal, a bit Victorian.

Do those phrases sound like the beginning of a book? At the Greenfield Middle School where I gave a presentation recently, Rob Buyea  (Because of Mr. Terupt) talked about the need for strong beginnings, the need for a hook to pull your readers in. I have been to a few writers’ retreats where they have “first page” readings. You submit a first page of a project and then it is read aloud to the group and then editors comment on the strengths or weaknesses of the first page. (You can check out this very favorable reaction to Rob Buyea’s book, Because of Mr. Terupt here: (http://theboyreader.blogspot.com/2010/10/because-of-mr-terupt-by-rob-buyea.html)

The first page determines so much. Not even the whole page, really. The first sentence. Never judge  book by its cover, only by its first sentence. 

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” - George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

“I am an invisible man.” - Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.” - James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

“I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;t hat not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind; and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost: Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly, I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.” - Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759n1767)

One night my voice kept saying this phrase to me, over and over again: “We knew the maple tree in the courtyard had shed its leaves because it was grieving for Oswald  …” and that more or less became the opening for The Shadow Collector’s Apprentice (Holiday House 2012) I changed Oswald to Jack, which changes a lot of things, because it wasn’t an Oswald sort of story. To me, the name Oswald implies a fairy tale.  Oswald is a Germanic name, I believe, meaning “man of the woods.” An interesting woman named Fagin I met at a spa in Mexico told me this. I am not at all the spa type, although it was a pleasant experience. I gave this person the name Fagin, not because she had anything to do with pickpocketing, and I don’t know why anymore why I named her, or why I named her Fagin.

The Bags of Fortune. Rootling through the bags in our minds is what we all do as writers, bringing up this and that.

Signing Napkins

I recently went to the Greenfield Middle School in Greenfield, Massachusetts and gave a talk along with Jeannine Atkins (please visit Jeannine at jeannineatkins.livejournal.com) and Rob Buyea. (www.robbuyea.com) 

It was a very nice experience as the parents, teachers, and kids who attended the talk were grateful to have the opportunity to meet real authors. It seems that Books can still be special. There was a little girl named Rayne. She had a wistful triangle of a face, and she couldn’t afford to buy a book. We signed bookmarks for her.

 I went to a book fair at a school once, and I happened to be sitting next to a Somebody. A child approached the Somebody with a napkin in hand and asked the Somebody if he would autograph her napkin. The Somebody said, “I don’t sign napkins.”

Hello again

Hello.

Well, I’m trying again. I’m trying to write a blog. I’m told that this is the best way to get people to read your books. Sorry, I don’t mean your books. I mean my books. But it's more than that. I believe it's sharing thoughts and trying to make sense of a funny world.

The word blog makes me think of a frog in a bog. It makes me think of spring when you walk by a bog, and you hear hundreds of chorusing frogs. Sorry, I mean when I walk by a bog and hear all that racket. It’s not chorusing at all, really. Chorusing implies a heavenly choir of angelic voices. Frogs croak. I guess that is an apt image for all of us bloggers. Here were all are sitting in our earthly bog, blogging. I am reminded of Emily Dickinson:

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!