Still Hot

On the first day of class in my Young Adult Fiction course, I read "Where the Wild Things Are" to my students. I do this because it introduces many of the themes we will encounter throughout the semester and also because I love to have the excuse to read the book aloud. But the book brings into the classroom much more than the practical and the pleasurable. When I read those words and turn those pages, a magic is released and reminds all of us, if any of us had forgotten, that literature written for young people plucks at our souls and makes them sing. Where the Wild Things Are is a wonderful place in the truest sense of "wonderful," but I have always found the most magical part of the book to be the last line. Max sails back home, in and out of weeks, to find his supper waiting for him: "and it was still hot." My students and I talk about why this is such a perfect ending to the story, and I often make the argument that it all hinges on the word "hot." If the food was warm, we would know that Max's mother had set the dish in his room but then had wandered away, turing her attention to something else. Because the supper is "still hot," we can be sure, as can Max, that his mother has taken special care with his supper. She knows what he needs and when he needs it. She doesn't need to be in his room, or in the final illustration, because Max knows she is there for him. The hot food makes her love plain. Lots of children's books, for young readers and older ones, are about journeys away from home, and these are fascinating and wonderful. But sometimes the journeys that move us most are the returns. When Wendy flies back into the nursery, when Alice runs inside for tea, when the Pevensie children tumble out of the wardrobe, when Harry goes to bed in his four-poster, readers are reminded that part of the magic of going away is the magic of coming back. Sendak captured this magic with beautiful simplicity. Maurice Sendak has gone away, and he sails off "in and out of weeks," my heart breaks because I know he won't come back. But I take comfort, as will countless readers for years to come, from the simple fact that his words will never leave us, and we can always come back to find them waiting for us. Still and always hot.

A 200th Birthday

Charles Dickens was born two hundred years ago today on February 7, 1812. Few literary figures have achieved such lasting renown as Dickens, a writer at once widely respected and popular both in his own time and now. Even children of the twenty-first century who may never have read a word of Dickens are familiar with Scrooge and Tiny Tim. Most people recognize, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" and "Please, sir, may I have some more?" Dickens left a mark not only on English literature but also on Western consciousness.

So, I wonder in this vaguely public forum, what sort of mark did he leave on me? As an academic who specializes in Victorian literature, I am not a typical reader of Dickens. I have read many of his novels (though fewer than I'd like to admit), taken and taught graduate seminars on his works, and published a chapter on his use of archaeological imagery in my monograph, Excavating Victorians. However, I am writing, as I try to do in "The Wardrobe Door," as an author of children's fiction, so I ask again, what sort of mark has my reading of Dickens left on my writing?

I think the answer has to do with people and places. I suspect Dickens' impact on me is greater even than I might realize, but I can acknowledge with certainty an influence on the way I craft characters and their homes.

A striking physical trait can define a character quickly and effectively. This can be some aspect of the character's appearance or a habit of movement or a speech pattern. Flora from Little Dorrit is a good example. She speaks in unending sentences that strain syntax, delightful to read aloud. She has other qualities, certainly, but this is the one that defines her. I have a character in the book I'm writing now whose speech pattern is nearly the opposite of Flora's: he speaks in clipped phrases. When he reappears at a key moment, my characters and my readers recognize him immediately because of his distinctive way of speaking.

The spaces people inhabit tell us a tremendous amount about them and their world. So much attention is given to Dickens' people that we often forget to attend to his places, which are just as highly wrought. Take Coketown, the fictionalized version of Manchester where Hard Times takes place. In a chapter title "The Key Note," Dickens describes Coketown as follows:

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.
Those mad, melancholy elephants amaze me every time I read this passage. What genius to offer such an unsettling, alien image of an industrial town! I don't linger over whole towns in my writing, or I haven't yet, but I do give careful attention to my characters' most intimate spaces: the pile of books on Micah's bed is probably the most striking example. In fact, because my characters have to draw places, details of space are important for them to notice and make use of. In other words, such images are not only thematic or atmospheric but essential to my plots.

Thank you, Charles Dickens, for Miss Havisham, the Ghost of Christmas Past, the megalosaurus waddling up Holborn Hill, Bill Sykes' dog, Bleak House, and those melancholy elephants. I join the many who write in your wake.

We Are What We Read

When I was in my mid-20s, I had a nasty case of the flu and was laid up for about two weeks. I felt pretty awful, so I curled up in comfy pjs, under comfy blankets, and surrounded myself with comfy books.

I had always been a big reader and prided myself on being able to read hard books. In fact, I was in graduate school pursuing a PhD in English, which means I spent my time reading lots of complex and brilliant literature. While this was deeply rewarding, the books I spent most of my time with were not comfy. So, for the first time since being a child, I went back to the book I had loved most when I was young: Madeleine L’Engle’s A Ring of Endless Light.

My copy of this book was a battered paperback, a library discard. It had been loved into fragility by many readers before me, and in my hands, the cover fell off, and the corners of the pages grew soft. Like a security blanket or a stuffed animal, the book offered comfort simply with its presence. The feel of it, even the smell of it transported me into a sort of cocoon, a strengthening safe space where I could recover from the flu but also grow into a fuller understanding of who I am.

Re-reading the book revealed a sort of archaeology of myself. I found the origins of beliefs, attitudes, even vocabulary. From my use of the phrase “hair-colored hair” to an abiding love for Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night” to a firm belief that when someone needs you, you come, who I am was shaped by A Ring of Endless Light. Going back to this childhood favorite in my early adulthood got me through the flu, but much more importantly, it carried me into a richer knowledge of myself.

We are what we read. Some books matter much more than others. As their pages soften, we grow stronger. We grow into ourselves.

Which book made you who you are?