Holding Space at Malaprop's

"State Senator Buck Newton made the comment while concluding a speech at a rally on Monday and welcomed the idea of being considered a poster child for the law, dubbed HB 2.

The law made North Carolina the first state in the country to require transgender people to use restrooms in public buildings and schools that match the sex on their birth certificate rather than their gender identity.

"Go home, tell your friends and family who had to work today what this is all about and how hard we must fight to keep our state straight," he said to applause." --Reuters AP report

"To The Honorable Governor Pat McCrory and members of the North Carolina General Assembly,

As the owners and managers of independent bookstores, part of our mission is to provide that “third place”, an additional public space other than home or work where folks can gather to discuss issues important to our community. Ray Oldenburg, in his book, The Great Good Place, “argues that "third places… are the heart of a community's social vitality and the grassroots of democracy.” As independent bookstores providing that third place in communities across our state, we believe it is essential to be non­discriminatory, inclusive and tolerant, to promote freedom of speech and equality, and to guard against censorship and unfair treatment.

Another part of our mission is to be profitable; to allow ourselves and our employees to earn a respectable living. What both of these mission statements share is the need for people to visit our stores and become customers. Authors have already started to cancel appearances at North Carolina bookstores over what the ACLU describes as “the most extreme anti­LGBT measure in the country.” This can and will have a real negative impact on our businesses. It doesn’t make sense, financially or otherwise, to choose discrimination over inclusion. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what lawmakers have done by passing HB2.

Company after company is withdrawing from doing business in NC until this legislation is repealed. Retailers and others are already feeling the economic impact of this legislation and we are sure, because of the momentum behind more businesses, conferences, artists, rock stars, authors, and ordinary citizens choosing places other than North Carolina to spend their vacations, the worst financial impact is yet to come.

Small Business Majority’s polling found 67 percent of North Carolina’s entrepreneurs believe North Carolina should have a law prohibiting employment discrimination against LGBT people. Nationally, two­thirds of small businesses say business owners shouldn’t be able to deny goods or services to LGBT individuals. (more info on this polling is here.)

For North Carolina, the choice between small businesses and discrimination should be clear. We hope our lawmakers make the right decision and repeal HB2." --letter from 0ver 30 independent NC bookstores.

I have to be in Asheville, NC, today to record a promo piece for a CD being giving out at ALA in June. Since I was travelling there anyhow, I asked my Dial publicist to see if Malaprop's wanted me to swing by and sign stock. (It's more polite to have your publicist do this, as the bookstore would feel less awkward about telling the publicist no.)

Bruce Springsteen, author Sherman Alexie, and other notables have recently cancelled appearances in North Carolina to protest HB2, the bathroom bill. 

Here's my question: why was HB2 passed now? What problem prompted its creation? It's not as though transgender people have only just begun to exist. It's not as if they're increasing in numbers. It's not as if they haven't always used public restrooms. I'm pretty sure the law exists exactly because of the thinking of people such as Buck Newton, quoted above. Make the state so unfriendly for LGBT people that they all up and leave--oh, except for the ones born to straight, God-fearin', homo-hating North Carolina parents. Those children, well, they'll just have to suffer. Or die. Whichever. So long as the entire state is, you know, straight.

This breaks my heart . But I'm happy to see that, after a protest led by none other than Malaprop's, the Asheville bookstore where I'm signing today, and where Sherman Alexie canceled his appearance, more and more professional writers' organizations, including the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, are calling on authors to actively support independent bookstores because they are exactly what they claim to be, a "third place."

I've always loved Malaprop's. I don't go there often because my travels tend to take me to nearby Asheville much less often than farther-away Nashville, with its lovely bookstore Parnassus, but Malaprop's holds a very special place in my heart because of the time they held space for me.

'Holding space' is a term I've only recently come across. It means to accompany someone through a difficult time, supporting them, being aware of them, but not judging or fixing them. It's a hard and beautiful thing.

So many years ago now--eleven?--I was on the brink of a complete mental health breakdown. I refer to it as the time I fell to pieces. I could feel the storm gathering but had no way out. For no reason other than I hoped it would help me feel better, I decided to go to Asheville for the day, in the middle of the week, in February, alone. I drove my children to school, then went to Asheville, then came back in time to pick them up, which gave me about 4 hours to wander the creative heart of the city.

I thought I was keeping myself more or less together, but I must have looked off, because what I remember most about that day is how kind and gentle total strangers kept being to me. Over and over, without my saying anything to them, without my asking for help in any way. (This is the day that sparked the Loom of God--a long story I'll tell someday, a sort of miracle let me know I was going to survive.) Anyhow, I spent a long time browsing Malaprop's. I took the books I was buying to the checkout and slid them across the counter. I handed the clerk my credit card. He took it, put my purchases in a bag, then reached into a drawer, took out a card, and scribbled something on the back of it. "Here," he said, handing it to me. "Take this over to our cafe, and get yourself something to eat and drink. Whatever you want. It's on us."

For no reason, except that I guess I needed kindness, and he saw it. Malaprop's held space for me, on a day when I desperately needed that. I don't remember what I ate or drank. I remember I did both, unquestioning, sitting in their cafe, chewing something, sipping. I don't remember feeling hungry; I remember that the Malaprop's guy told me to eat and drink, so I did, for free. There's something holy there. 

I hope and believe Malaprop's holds space for everyone. I know for sure they aren't monitoring their toilets. I'll be there at 3 pm to sign some books, which anyone can buy in person or online. 

Think about why some people feel we need laws like HB2. Think about people like the clerk at Malaprop's. Think about which side you'd rather be on.

Missing Rolex

In Lexington, Kentucky, right now, one of my tribes has gathered. They're walking across the dew-drenched grass of the horse park in Dubarry boots, large cups of coffee clutched in their hands. They're setting up, getting ready, listening to volunteer instructors or grooming horses or watching riders warm up or fiddling with the electronics for the judging and the commentary. A few of them, a very lucky few, are getting their game faces on. They're riding today in the first part of a four-day competition, the biggest American event in my sport. It's officially the Kentucky Rolex Three-Day Event, but we just call it Rolex. Last year I wrote about being there with so many friends from our small, intensely-connected sport.

This year I'm spending the day with my novel. My daughter has a conference tennis match this afternoon; Saturday she's going to her Senior Prom. My daughter first went to Rolex when she was three months old. Last year she got to be the electronic scribe for one of the dressage judges. She only gets one prom, one final varsity tennis match, and so I'm glad we've stayed home, but part of my heart is at Rolex this morning.

It's an Olympic trials this year. Lauren Kieffer's riding Veronica. Hannie has William (Harbour Pilot). Ellie's on RF Eloquence again. Marilyn's got Demi. I care about all these tough young women; I care about their safety and I care about their success. Watching Lauren, in particular, grow up with the sport is something I've very much enjoyed. I told her before that I've dubbed myself her honorary great-aunt, removed from her day-to-day life but interested in her success. Two years ago, when she absolutely killed her Rolex dressage test to take the overnight lead, I told her just afterward, "I can say I knew you back before you were famous. This winter, in Florida, she congratulated me on my Newbery Honor, grinned, and said, "I knew you back before you were famous!"

I'm supposed to be home this year, but good golly, I hope she kills it again. I hope they all do.

Ten Things From This Weekend

 Ten Things from this weekend:

1) I, my husband, and my daughter had a terrific time in Charlotte visiting my sister, her husband, and her two sons.

2) I had been afraid that her sons, Louie and Fred, ages 3 1/2 and 1 1/2, would not remember me, since it's been a long time since they saw me and they are small.

3) Louie rushed into my arms, yelling, "Uncle Kim! Uncle Kim!" Fred doesn't attempt my name yet (Kim is hard for babies; Fred calls my husband "Bar-Bar" and my daughter "T!") but grinned and launched himself at me the moment he saw me. I think Fred reacts this way to everyone, but I'll pretend he just really missed me.

4) Charlotte has awesome shopping, which was excellent because my daughter has to have a white dress and matching shoes for a graduation ceremony.

5) I think that high schools which require girls to go purchase a specific type of dress for a graduation ceremony ought to rethink that. The graduates are not brides. My son's summer internship business described the corporate dress code to him as, "If you could wear it at a fancy golf course, you're fine." Tell the girls, "If you could wear it to a Baptist church, you're fine," and I think we'd be good.

6) That said, we did find her a very pretty dress.

7) It's now less than a week until my son comes home from his semester in London.

8) It's also less than a month until my daughter graduates from high school.

9) Time is simultaneously moving too quickly and too slow.

10) As I told my sister this weekend, you'll have that. Don't blink.

Friday Tea In The Cloud: Smith College

Question: what do the following women have in common: Madeleine L'Engle, Jane Yolen, Natalie Babbitt, Anne M. Martin, Cynthia Voigt, Elizabeth George Speare, and me?

Answer: We are all graduates of Smith College. Oh, and we're all also writers who have been honored by the children's department of the American Library Association, either with a Caldecott (Jane Yolen) or a Newbery or Newbery Honor (all the rest of us). I don't know if it's a record number of award winners from a particular institution, but it's certainly an amazingly high percentage. If you want to be a children's book author, go to Smith!

Smith was the first women's college in the country to give actually academic degrees. (Oberlin, co-ed, admitted women earlier; Mount Holyoke and other colleges began earlier as finishing-school type places and eventually became fully academic.) It was founded in 1871. It was, and I hope still is, a radically inclusive place, where an introverted midwestern Catholic could feel at home in a campus that tilted in a completely opposite direction. I had four marvelous years at Smith, and I treasure all I learned there.

Students at Smith live primarily on-campus for all four years, in houses that range in size from 16 to 90 students. When I was a student each house had its own dining room. That's no longer the case, but Friday house teas endure. On Friday afternoon, in the living room of each house, students would gather for tea and cookies, hang out, and enjoy the close to the week. It was a terrific tradition.

So now some of us are gathering online, to share our choice of beverage, our best of the week, and our worst of the week. My best of the week right now is that it's raining. My pastures desperately need rain, and after suffering a horrible drought several years ago I am pretty much happy each and every time it rains. My worst of the week is the amount of work I've got to do on that book of mine. I know it's better to take the time and effort to write the best book possible; I know I'm lucky to work as a writer; I know I can do the work. I know this book can be good. I just don't want to have to work that hard. There you are.

But I've got my sisters' examples: Elizabeth, Cynthia, Natalie, Anne. Madeleine L'Engle, who was the hero of my childhood, and who I got to have dinner with while at Smith. (Madeleine was coming to speak at an event sponsored by the college chapel. The Catholic Chaplain called me up and asked, "Have you ever heard of Madeleine L'Engle?" "Uh, yes," I stammered. [A Wrinkle in Time was the first book I ever finished and then immediately began reading again, because I wanted to know WHY I liked it so much. I mark this as the first step toward my becoming a writer]. "Well," said the chaplain, "would you mind very much accompanying her to dinner?" This, my young friends, is the sort of reward you get for attending Mass while at college.) Jane, who not only taught me the ins and outs of writing for publication but who would still kick my ass for complaining. So I won't complain. I'll sip my tea (coffee), think of my fellow Smithies, and smile.

My Only Memory of Prince

I wasn't going to write a blog post today. I'm writing my book over again, and that's enough. But I just heard about Prince's death--the artist known as Prince--and it brought back one memory, which had nothing to do with his music, of which I knew very little about except the song "Purple Rain."

At the end of my sophomore year in college, I stayed on campus an extra week so I could attend graduation. In exchange for being allowed to stay in my dorm room I had to do a certain amount of room cleaning, because the dorms would all be used for alumnae attending reunions the weekend of graduation. Most rooms were empty except for dust bunnies and college-owned furniture. My dorm that year had big double-sided closets with sliding doors in all the rooms. When I went into one room, the closet door was open, one half slid behind the other. Just as an afterthought, as I was leaving the cleaned room, I slid the closet door closed.

Taped to the door, previously obscured but not revealed in all its glory, was a full-sized photographic poster of Prince, naked as the day he was born.

It wasn't all that impressive, if you want the truth. 

Crazy Good

So my life has been crazy all year so far. I usually keep up a pretty fast-paced schedule, lots of travel, lots of family, horse stuff, all the books--but the start of 2016 has been extraordinary even by my standards. There was that whole Newbery Honor thing. The Josette Frank. A big trip during our daughter's spring break, to see our son, all that time I spent in Florida with my horse, and I've never even mentioned in this blog the weekend I took my husband off to New York for his Christmas present, which was tickets to Hamilton.

So before we could draw breath my husband and I went to Paris. This was nuts on many levels. We were going to be with our son, even though we just saw him 2 weeks ago and he'll be home in another 2 weeks. We went for only long weekend--flying out Wednesday night, so that we arrived in Paris late Thursday afternoon, and leaving for home very very early on Monday morning--not much of time for such a big effort. We had to leave our daughter home with my mother--though nobody could see that as a disadvantage, my daughter got to spend several days soaking up her grandmother's love and full attention, which I don't think has ever happened before, and which they both seemed to revel in.

But when my son was planning his semester in London, my husband and I asked him, if he could do anything with us while he was there, what would he chose? And he said he wanted to play golf in Paris again with his dad.

We took a family spring break vacation to Paris several years ago--I think five? maybe six--and, being golf fanatics, my husband and son played golf in Chantilly, Fontainbleau, and a course just outside Paris which is quite private and quiet and beautiful. They had a marvelous time, particularly in Paris. (Meanwhile, my daughter and I toured the chateaus and towns of Chantilly and Fontainbleau, and went on a private chocolate tour of Paris. It was win-win.) That round of golf was one of the highlights of my son's high school years.

So they did it again. My son took the train from London to Paris and met us for dinner Thursday night. Friday they played 36 holes of golf, while I walked the city, meandering through the markets and gardens and a couple of museums, stopping to drink champagne on a sidewalk cafe, and gleefully taking a photo of my book TWTSML on the shelves of the English-language bookstore on the Rue de Rivoli. Afterwards we had an amazing dinner together, then had ice cream back at our hotel.

Saturday we started by touring Sacre Coeur, the white church high on Paris's only big hill. My husband and I suggested we take the Metro, or at very least the funicular from the hill's base, but my son has gotten used to walking the length and breadth of Europe, and he said, "You'd seriously pay money to avoid walking up a hill?" so we did not. We went up the Arc de Triomphe and through the Opera House and up and down city streets until it was late at night and we were watching the light show on the Eiffel Tower, and then we found ice cream at a sidewalk cafe. We like ice cream.

Sunday we went to Mass at Notre Dame Cathedral, met friends for lunch, saw our darling boy off to the train station. I was ready for a nap then, but my husband wanted to see Sainte-Chappelle, and then there were some other things to see, and then another good restaurant, and then it was time to sleep for four hours and head home. It was crazy short and crazy to do and crazy good in all respects.

Years ago, when I first started recovering from a major bout of depression, I could feel that our family  was getting smaller, less adventurous, more guarded in response. My illness had been a very big deal so this was a natural reaction, but I didn't want us to live that way. It seemed to me, then and now, that we can either work to expand our personal worlds, or we can let them shrink. I took charge and planned a trip for all of us to the rainforest of the most remote part of Costa Rica. My children were frightened, my husband supportive but skeptical. It turned out to be a fabulous, healing adventure. Ever since my husband and I have tried consciously to expand our world. Paris wasn't new territory for us, but deciding to pack up and travel more when our lives were already spinning so fast was new. It was the right choice. Our son has another great memory, and so do his father and I.

An Editor Like That

Fourteen years ago, I spoke at a writing conference in Los Angeles. On the morning the conference began, all of us speakers, who had flown in from the east coast the night before, woke up really, really early, due to the time change, and sat about in the hotel restaurant having coffee for awhile. We were all established, traditionally-published writers. I was the only person who wrote for children. At some point in the breakfast, I told a long story about my most recent novel, and how my editor had looked at one of the early drafts, told me that I was taking too much time and space to tell the story (it was a journey story), and that I needed to have all the same action take place in half the distance, half the time.

The group gave me a respectful moment of silence. Being writers, they all instantly grasped that I had to rewrite every single scene of my book. Then one woman said, "And so?"

I said, "It's much better now."

A collective sigh ran through the group. Another woman said, wistfully, "I wish I had an editor like that."

I recount this story to make myself feel a bit better. On Wednesday, sandwiched in between having a tooth pulled and leaving for a trip to Paris, I had a conversation with my editor about the sequel to The War That Saved My Life. I strongly suspect we should have had this conversation months ago, but the good news is, we've had it. The bad news is that I'm facing a really enormous rewrite.

The good news is that I'm facing a really enormous rewrite.

I like Jess very much as both an editor and a person. However, we are new to each other (my previous editor retired, though no fault of my own) and it has taken us a little while for us to learn to talk to each other. Based on last week's conversation, I suspect that what she thought she was saying and what I thought she was saying, as well as what she thought I was saying and what I thought I was saying, were all different things. One point of continued contention was my character Ada's emotional reaction (X) to a situation (Y). Jess kept hinting gently that she thought Ada's reaction should be Z. I refused to change it, because Ada's only honest reaction to Y, based on who she is and also based on how all traumatized children, every single one in history across time, behave, is X. I was absolutely unwilling to be dishonest to Ada, especially given all we've been through.

Jess didn't like X. X permeated the story. I could not change X. You see the problem. I kept writing new drafts. Jess hoped I would come to dislike X on my own. I would never, ever come to dislike X. X was Ada's truth. No way out. I wrote increasingly polished and competent drafts--some very good, strong, clear writing--that all centered around X.

Now, my previous editors, Liz and Lauri, with whom I've worked on several books (Liz is the one that retired. Lauri's president of the whole shebang now, so doesn't work on books directly. I can call on Lauri for help anytime if I needed it--heck, I can call on Liz, she's retired but she's not dead--but I never needed to, and I still don't) would have said, possibly a couple of drafts ago, "We need to get rid of X. Figure it out." I liken this to the moment in Hamilton when Alexander Hamilton wants Washington to stong-arm Hamilton's financial plan into being, but Washington insists Hamilton find a way to win Congressional approval. (I'm on a Hamilton kick. I liken everything to Hamilton. Amazing how well that works.) Anyhow, Lauri especially had a useful blunt way of saying, "This must be different. Figure it out." It took Jess and I longer to get to that level of communication, but we did get there.

"X is the truth," I said. (Stubbornly.)

"You're dealing with three kinds of truth here," Jess said. "You've got Ada's truth, historical truth, and the truth that this story needs. You have to satisfy all three."

Just there, I got the glimmering of an idea. I ran away to Paris for a long weekend (not kidding. What can I say? I went to see my son) and thought hard about it. The problem was not X. The problem was that X was the correct emotional reaction to Y. The problem, therefore, was actually Y.

Y is a plot point. Unlike emotional truths, plot points can be manipulated entirely at will. If I get rid of Y, I can get rid of X, with a clear conscience and a light heart. I can replace X with Z and feel I've done Ada no disservice. I can write the honest book Ada deserves.

Of course, I have absolutely no idea what Z will look like. Getting rid of Y means getting rid of a substantial part of the front of the book. I'll detonate a bomb and create a new picture from the fragments. The bad news is that this is going to take a smidgen of time. The book has been moved from spring of 2017 to fall of 2017, temporarily, until we see if that gives me time enough. The good news is that it will be a better book.

Everyone should be so lucky, to have an editor like that.