From The To Read Again (and Again and Again) List: FROM THE MIXED-FILES OF MRS. BASIL E. FRANKWEILER

I’ve been on a re-reading kick lately.  Part of this is because I’m working on an essay for my master’s thesis, and I need to go back and re-read the books I want to write about.  But once I started re-reading for school, I decided that I kind of liked it.  It’s something I rarely do, as there are so many awesome new books to read, but it’s nice to be reminded that books I read a while ago and thought were great are still really great.  It was in this vein that I recently returned to one of my all-time favorites: From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E. L. Konigsburg.

I loved this book in elementary school, but I hadn’t read it in…um…many, many years.  Like, about twenty-five years.  And I am very happy to announce that I still absolutely love it.  I love Claudia for being a practical dreamer and a grammarian.  I love Jamie for cheating at cards and hating to wash and having his life savings in coins that weigh down his pockets (and for being an anti-grammarian).  I love the fact that these siblings run away not to the woods, or even to some dangerous city streets, but to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  And I love the fact that a feisty and funny art lover and octogenarian tells their story as no one else could.

It may sound cliché, but this book makes me smile.  It is funny and timeless and just pretty wonderful.  When I get on another re-reading kick, this one is definitely going on the list.  I’m completely confident that I’ll love it again, and I’ll smile again, in twenty-five years.  In fact, I’m already looking forward to it.

For Ali

My friend and colleague Ali McKenna passed away earlier this week.  Ali has been in my thoughts, as has her family.  Not only has Ali inspired many high school students, but she was my teacher as well, and she had a real and lasting effect on my path as a writer, so I wanted to write a short piece in her honor here.

When I signed up for Ali's teacher-writer retreat, I'd been writing fiction for about a year.  But just about no one beyond my immediate family--and only a few of them--knew I'd started writing.  I wrote like crazy as a kid, and even as a teenager, but somewhere along the way, I stopped.  Even when I started again, tentatively at first, but with a growing velocity, I was reluctant to admit that I was a writer, for that seemed a very foolish thing to admit.  When I read the description of Ali's class, a writing retreat for teachers to be held on the grounds of a boy scout camp a few miles from town, I knew I wanted to go.  At the same time, I was terrified.  I signed up anyway, in no small part because I trusted Ali.

I still look back at that weekend as the weekend I "came out" as a writer.  And it wasn't just because I signed up and showed up.  It was because under Ali's guidance, I allowed myself to take risks and write like it mattered to me, because it did.  With her warmth and humor, Ali created a place where I felt safe enough to admit that I am a writer.  And with Ali, and the amazing group of teacher-writers who gathered around her that early June weekend, that didn't seem foolish at all.  It actually seemed pretty awesome.

On the second afternoon, Ali pulled out one of her many writing prompts: a gigantic garbage bag filled with all sorts of random objects from masks to scarves.  We all had to pull an object out of the bag, and we were to use that object as fuel for a piece of writing.  I reached in and came up with a fishing reel.  No pole or string, just the reel.

"I don't even fish," I said to Ali.

"Do you want to pull something else?" she asked evenly.

I looked down at the reel.  "No," I said, even though I kind of did.

We had a decent length of time to ponder our objects and write our pieces.  Some people started writing immediately.  Others turned their objects over in their hands.  I took my fishing reel and walked out of the cabin. 

Though it was many years ago, I remember that afternoon so clearly.  The beach was slightly damp, and the ocean slightly roiled with waves.  It was windy, and a little drizzly, but not soak-your-bones wet.  The sand slowed my gait.  I walked until I lost sight of the cabin, of the people, of everything.  And all the while I spun the handle on the fishing reel.  Clickclickclickclickclick.

Eventually, he arrived.  A dark-haired boy with old leather boots and scuffed jeans.  A boy who carried a fishing reel--clickclickclickclickclick--as he walked across the playground blacktop.  A boy with a story to tell.

That was the first time I wrote about Tommy Coast.  I wrote about Tommy many times afterwards, and what started on that beach became my most personal piece of fiction, the first time I ever allowed myself, my greatest fears and wonders and pains, onto the page.  And while I've moved on to new stories since "The Fishing Reel," it taught me so much about writing, and bravery and truth.  And it was inspired by a teacher who believed in writing and bravery and truth, a teacher who believed in me.  And so, just as that fishing reel, that clickclickclickclickclick, is still a part of everything I write, so is Ali.

Shades of Uncertainty in A BLUE SO DARK

Last week was banned books week.  I thought about writing something here, but in the end I didn’t post because I wasn’t sure I had something new to add to the discussion.  I mean, is it very useful or surprising for me to say I’m against banning books, that I prefer a world where readers choose for themselves the ideas that they’re exposed to?  Probably not.  On the other hand, I did think about the issue more than I otherwise might have (I suppose that’s the point of these themed weeks), and one thing I thought is that I’m a little bit glad that book banning is still an issue.  Why?  Because it means that writers are still writing books that might be considered dangerous, books that venture into uncertain territory.  And all the interesting stuff happens in that uncertain territory.

Holly Schindler’s A Blue So Dark is one of those books that ventures into uncertain, and possibly dangerous territory.  It’s a YA novel that explores the links between creativity and mental illness, and it does so without flinching, and without offering clean and neat solutions.  It’s narrated by Aura, who’s in eleventh grade, who prefers wearing loose sweatshirts to pretty blouses, whose dad has moved on to a new family, and whose mom is an artist suffering from schizophrenia.  And Aura is an artist too, making the fact of her mother’s schizophrenia all the more complicated and terrifying.  With Aura’s dad busily embracing his new life, and with her best friend busily adapting to being a teenaged mother, Aura is left to deal with her mother’s rapidly escalating psychotic break all alone.  And there s something far more lonely about the fact that her mother, her beautiful, talented, amazing mother, is there the whole time.

Schindler writes,

And even though I know [mom’s] got the world muddled, that nothing she does should hurt me because she’s not even in the same world I’m in anymore, I look at those mermaids piled in the sink—the ones she’s tried to destroy—and I hear her words to the shopkeeper who carved them: We’re just alike, me and Aura.  Suddenly, my heart is in that sink, blackened into some unrecognizable, useless brick of ash. (170)

That passage captures the chaos and fear that penetrates Aura’s life as well the strangeness and beauty that penetrates Schindler’s novel.  It is a novel of wooden mermaids and ash, of thick gobs of paint and a life swirling down a bathroom drain, of troubles and light.

Happy Belated Banned Books Week.  If you’re looking to read a book that ventures off the beaten path, that has shades of uncertainty nestled alongside beauty, you might dive into the oceans of A Blue So Dark.