For Your Weekend (04.08.22)
Including Video of a Novel: Day 50!
A few years ago, I was reading Charlotte’s Web to Leo and Poppy. They were around 6- and 4-years-old, and they loved the story. The book I was reading to them had lovely pictures they could look at if they grew bored with my reading, but for the most part they were tracking along with Charlotte and Wilbur and all the escapes in the farmyard.
As we grew closer and closer to the end, Leo realized what was happening: Charlotte was dying. And as we came up to that final paragraph, he put his hand on the book, tears in his eyes, and said, “Stop reading.” He was trying to smile. He didn’t want me to keep going, because as long as we stopped, Charlotte would never die.
But I convinced him, and we kept going.
"But as Wilbur was being shoved into the crate, he looked up at Charlotte and gave her a wink. She knew he was saying good-bye in the only way he could. And she knew her children were safe.
“Good-bye!” she whispered. Then she summoned all her strength and waved one of her front legs at him.
She never moved again. Next day, as the Ferris wheel was being taken apart and the race horses were being loaded into vans and the entertainers were packing up their belongings and driving away in their trailers, Charlotte died. The Fair Grounds were soon forlorn. The infield was littered with bottles and trash. Nobody, of the hundreds of people what had visited the Fair, knew that a grey spider had played the most important part of all. No one was with her when she died.
He wept. I wept. Poppy, still very young, only looked at the two of us with wide eyes.
I was reminded of this moment in time while listening to the podcast “On Being” this week in which Krista Tippett interviews Kate DiCamillo, one of my favorite authors of all time. Another writer had posed the question, should we who write for children tell the truth or protect children’s innocence? Because you can’t do both. You can’t tell the truth about the world without giving children knowledge they haven’t had before.
Kate’s answer was fabulous.
“Tell the truth and make it bearable…the only answer is love…we must love the world.”
I’ve included a link to this podcast conversation in the list below, for your weekend.
Shelter in Place: Cloud Cuckoo Land (a wonderful conversation with Anthony Doerr, who Maile and I discuss in this week’s podcast)
Maile and I talk this week on our podcast about tough parenting weekends and good book endings.
“Sometimes a breeze would blow through the window and she’d tumble face first off the front, and I’d find her lying in the middle of our floor. Now that we’ve moved, she has a frame of her very own, and she hangs out right above my writing desk, looking down at me with her green eyes and this cheeky grin on her face. “You’ve got this,” she’s saying. And I think I might believe her.”
And now for Video of a Novel: Day 50 (Day 50!!!) in which I talk about one of the things George Saunders says differentiates writers who get published from those who do not…