A Novel Idea

I dearly love the daily OM Leo horoscope that I signed up to receive ages ago. The email always comes as a surprise.  For whatever reason, the horoscope is far from “daily,” but that’s okay.  Yesterday it showed up and the subject heading alone was enough to keep me happy for weeks.  ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES, it said.  Told me that the world is mine if only I ask the universe.  Instead of seeing things as impossible, the message read, your thoughts may be turning toward what you are able to achieve with your special talents. I thought of the manuscript, of course.

Then this pronouncement:  there is nothing holding you back.  Hear that?  Nothing holding you back.  As I listen to the calling of my soul, it says here, I’ll expand (figuratively, not literally, I hope) into an unlimited world and courageously seize the opportunities that await me.

I’m able to recall all this because it was too good to delete before I made a printout and tacked it to my bulletin board.   So here’s the deal.  I’m offering it to you, too — Leo or not.  More than happy to share the message… especially this last prediction:  Everything you encounter today will be a joyful challenge for it will take you further along your true path.

I ask you, what are we waiting for?

Okay, I admit I was a total mess, reading the names and messages on gravestones in the section they call Babyland.  (A tattered baseball sits beside one marker, its worn leather scribbled with love notes to a baby boy who will never have a catch, in this world, with the dad who left it there.)   And, no, I still can’t conjure up why anyone would pick a cemetery for the site of a wedding ceremony, though there are an average of twenty there per year.

But as I wandered, map in hand, to possible sites for a fictional resting place, I was struck by the peace I felt, and the beauty all around me.  When I mentioned the visit in a Facebook status report, cemetery fans commented.

“Sounds thrilling to me.  I love cemeteries – so serene and fascinating,” said friend, Doug.  “The story possibilities of all those ‘lives’ just spread out before you are awesome.”

Tracy declared her love for Lakewood, in particular, saying that she’d enjoyed visits with her mother, who died when she was fourteen:  “In high school, I used to ride my bike and get Taco Bell and have lunch with her.  Then I got in trouble with the groundskeeper and he made me leave my bike at the entrance.  It was quite a walk to her grave…”

I kept my eye out for the imagined gravesite.  Finally, when I came upon a hill like the one I’d described in the manuscript, I asked Claire, one of the characters, for input.  This is the place, right?

A bouquet of sunflowers, tied with string, caught my eye.  They lay, not on any existing grave, but just beyond a row.  As if in answer, on the crown of a gently rolling hill, they marked the spot that I’d been looking for.  I love sunflowers.  I picked up the bouquet to appreciate them, just in case no one else had done so.  Then, in wonderment, I set them back down – site found, the search over.

Mosaic ceiling of chapel at Lakewood Cemetery, Minneapolis, MN

I spent one of the stranger Saturday mornings of my life wandering through Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis, looking for a plot for a character in my manuscript.  I’m not talking “plot” as in story line, but plot as in gravesite.  The salesman at the counter in the administration building looked befuddled.

I tried repeatedly to clarify.  “No, the gravesite’s not for a real person.  It’s for an imaginary one.”

It’s not as if I haven’t been to this cemetery on a few occasions, each and every time heading directly to an open grave at somebody’s funeral.   So I’ve always associated the grounds with dying and grieving.  Never had the impulse to return to focus on the real estate.

But now I can tell you that, like Mona Arguedas, I find the place exceedingly cool.  It’s definitely not your run-of-the-mill graveyard.  The chapel, for one, with its mosaic interior, inspired by the design in the San Marco Cathedral in Venice, is a work of art, a national treasure.  Funny, how it took an “imaginary” character to change my attitude, a shift from a need to do time in a city of the dead to the desire to spend time, inside the gates.

Madeleine L’Engle said,  “You have to write the book that wants to be written.  And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”

More recently, Neil Gaiman, a best-selling writer for both adults and the young, admitted that, in his view,  “children’s fiction is the most important fiction of all.”

He made the confession in his acceptance speech for the Newbery Medal, which, along with the Caldecott, is arguably the most coveted award in the field of children’s literature:  “We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living.  But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can.  Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story.  Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person.  And who with that story may have hope or wisdom or kindness or comfort.  And that is why we write.”

When it comes to literature for the young, my mantra has always been: “Not just any book will do.”  For years, I convinced all kinds of people of the transformative power of children’s books — board books to YA lit.  Persuaded more than a few to become downright passionate about them.

I taught children’s literature at Earlham College, but it was when my firstborn went off to school that I began pushing the best of books in earnest. I started a program that spread from her kindergarten classroom to other grades and to other schools in Minnesota.  Fueled by a passion for getting the best of books into the hands of as many kids as possible, I created themed collections for volunteers to borrow from public libraries and to house in classroom Book Nooks.  In their midst, day in and day out, were rotating collections of books, hundreds of them in all, celebrated by still more volunteers who came in to joyfully read aloud to everybody several times each week.

During series of workshops, I read from and shared insights about books of humor, beauty, and power.  It felt ridiculous, actually, to be paid for the privilege of letting other adults in on the secret — that these books are among the best and the brightest of all literary creations… and that of all genres of literature, they have the greatest impact.

Given such exposure, a fan base for this literature grew among the grownups as much as the students– freed to come to the books with no strings (or quizzes or assigned reading levels) attached.  These adult readers discovered, firsthand, the powerful difference one or another book can make in the life of a child.  So, rest assured, I make the shift from celebrating books to writing them with a heightened sense of responsibility… and daring.

I’m surprised by the intensity of the happiness I feel  — Pete’s come upon me humming, singing today — but the manuscript, tweaked again and again, is ready for the advance readers I’ve handpicked to give me feedback.  I mean, it’s not as if the tweaking is now history.  Writing is all about rewriting.  Despite the umpteen rounds of revision that led to the manuscript in hand, there are bound to be more ahead.  But I’ve definitely reached a milestone on the journey to publication.

I was up until 4 A.M., wrestling words and ideas into place — realizing, at last, that I had to give up control and abandon the need to feature the first line also as the story’s last one.  I needed to make very little of characters’ different views on what, if anything, lies beyond the veil — leave it to the reader to decide.  I made myself go to bed and slept until 11, back at it for the rest of the day until things fell into place and the story “felt” complete.  It’s a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and I couldn’t be more excited or happy or thankful.  As Claire might put it, it’s like hanging out for a while on the outskirts of heaven.