Losing Alice

It's been a funny few days. Unrelated things keep popping up, reminding me of a specific time in my life, 13 years ago. It's when I fell to pieces. It's also when I was teaching middle-school drama.

Yesterday I learned that one of my drama kids has died.

I knew her when she was a little girl, riding ponies at the barn where I boarded my horse. I knew her as a 6th-grader in my drama class. I lost track of her after that--not surprising, as her family moved away. Reading the obituary last night I learned that she'd been a high-school athlete sidelined by a rare disease. She'd received a kidney transplant, graduated college, married young, and, last Friday, died.

I found out when a mutual friend posted on the internet a photo of her in pigtails on a pony. I recognized her immediately, but when I was thinking of her last night it was all in regards to our drama class. I had a class of about 20 middle-schoolers, 6th, 7th, and 8th grades. We presented Barbara Robinson's "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever," and this girl, the one who died, played Alice. I remember that she was one of the students who really learned something over the semester. We had a few students who were naturally very talented, and a few who were never going to be strong actors, and then some in the middle, who by working hard became better than they or I expected.

The character Alice gives voice to the pivotal moment of the play, when nasty Imogene Herdman, the antagonist, transforms into the persona of Mary, the mother of God. The whole stageful of children goes completely silent until Alice says, gasping, "Mary's crying! Mrs. Bradley--Mary's crying."

I went to sleep with that phrase ringing in my head, "Mrs. Bradley--Mary's crying," remembering the pitch-perfect way this girl said it into that silence. I thought, though, that I must have been remembering it wrong. I'm Mrs. Bradley. It's what all the drama kids called me. But I looked up the script this morning, and the primary adult character is indeed Mrs. Bradley. I'd remember it correctly.

Oh, Alice. Mrs. Bradley's crying.

The Appalachian Literacy Initiative

I'm at our mountain place with my daughter--we're having a few sweet days together before she leaves AGAIN, for fencing camp, tomorrow. But of course I'm up early (puppy!) and she's not, so I'm working on stuff for my new non-profit.

I'm so excited about it. It's called the Appalachian Literacy Initiative. My friend Tracy and I created it, and now we have a board, non-profit status, a bank account, and we've applied for tax-free status from the IRS (which was a huge boatload of paperwork). All that's left is to start to actually help people!

ALI began when I asked to give a talk on the subject of my choice last year at the Tennessee Association of School Librarians conference. I picked the need for diversity of all types in children's books, and, among other things, researched the number of Tennessee children actually non-white (I could only get Nashville stats--that would be 68%. The east side of TN is more white, the west side less than that, and Nashville's in the center). Then I looked at poverty. What I found there led me to look at national statistics, and here we are--these are from 2016--if you divide all fourth-graders between those that do and do not receive free or reduced-price school lunch (which usually indicates a family whose income is below twice the federal poverty line)--56% of the higher income kids read at "proficient" level, and only 22% of the lower-income kids do. 

Yep. Nationwide, you're 2 1/2 times more likely to read at proficient level if you're not poor. (In Tennessee gap is actually larger.)

So I went digging some more--Donalyn Miller's got a great piece about this--and decided that the best thing I could do to help was get books into children's hands. The best way to get children to read books is to let them chose the books, even among a limited number. So we're launching in fourth-grade classrooms throughout Appalachia this fall. Four times a year we'll send teachers a set of books--10 for the first set, probably 6 for the other three, though that's not set in stone. Then all of their students can chose which book they want to order. We'll ship the classroom the books, which are the students' to keep. 

We've got a lot of other ideas: supplying books for classroom lit circles, creating mobile book fairs, working with schools to improve their libraries. (You won't believe this--or maybe you will--but there are schools in these poor rural counties that don't have libraries. Period. And neither do the towns. And there are no bookstores. And people living in entrenched poverty don't have credit cards, so they aren't ordering off Amazon, not that they would anyway because they don't have money for extras like books.) Anyhow, that's my rant. We're very excited about this.

These are statistics from 2016, that I used in my 2017 talk at TASL.

Schoolchildren in Tennessee

48.9% receive free or reduced-price school lunch

32.3% live in families that receive SNAP (food stamps)

24.1% live in poverty

11% live in extreme poverty

5% live in foster care

48.4%  of 3rd-5th graders are reading at proficient level

Of 4th-graders eligible for free lunch, 22% are reading at proficient level.

This means  that 88% of 4th-grades NOT eligible for free lunch are reading at proficient level.

Now We Are Fifty-One

Today is my husband's fifty-first birthday; he's caught up to me once again. He's got a terrific cold and so is celebrating by canceling the late-afternoon golf game with friends and lovely dinner with me that he had planned, but he still woke at 5:30 and went off to give sight to the blind.

"Sight to the blind" sounds like hyperbole but it's really what he does. He's a cataract surgeon.

I thought of trying to write a post that was 51 things about him, but realized that I'd either have to get way too personal (Rule #1 of my blog: only tell my own story) or else I'd have to resort to stupid things like, "He hates coconut," which is true but tells you nothing important about him.

Our wedding anniversary is in four days. We were married when we were 22, in the summer between college graduation and the beginning of medical school. We didn't know anything; of course we didn't. No one does at 22.

For our honeymoon we went to Paris. We stayed in a very small hotel on the Left Bank where no one spoke English except the owner. Every morning as we set out, walking down the cobbled street to the Metro station, the owner would stick her head out the front door and yell, "Courage, children!"

We walked and walked. I had the most unsuitable shoes in the world. (They were cute, though.) A heat wave hit Paris that week; it was 104 degrees. Our hotel had no air-conditioning. Nothing had air-conditioning. When we were in Rome last week my husband said, "Have we ever been on vacation anywhere hotter?" and I reminded him of our honeymoon.

Sometimes I realize that I can describe in very few words something about my life right now that would make my former self, my 22-year-old newly-married self, giddy with joy. "You and Bart went to visit your daughter studying abroad in Rome," would be one such sentence. Or, "The sunrise on your farm this morning was beautiful." "The trees you planted have grown so tall." "Your husband turned fifty-one this morning. He loves you more than he did when he was sixteen."

Happy birthday, darling. For the record, I do too.

Rome, and Back Again

I just got back from a short week/long weekend in Rome. Some people think my husband and I are nuts for doing this length of trip overseas, but it works really well with his schedule--he doesn't miss any operating time. We're both good at sleeping on the overnight flight to Europe, and that happens after he's put in at least a half day of work. With the Fourth of July holiday he only missed 2 1/2 days of work and we got five full days on the ground in the Eternal City.

We went there because our daughter is there, studying Latin amid the ancient ruins in stultifying heat. We are very impressed with her. We always have been, of course--she's our child, sheesh--but now we're impressed with her enthusiasm and the way she navigates a foreign city and a foreign culture, and the fact that she's sleeping in a tiny un-air-conditioned apartment whose windows don't open at all.

On our first night, we were having dinner just off the Piazza Popolo, which is both lovely and a magnet for touts selling crap to tourists. I had my back to the sidewalk, so when someone said, "Here you go, Ma'am," I thought it was our waiter, and I blindly reached out and took a handful of roses from a man selling them. This was a big mistake--in my defense, it was an accident, I do know better--but usually nothing on earth will make guys like this take the roses back, and if you don't pay them something you get into a big messy yelling fight on the street and they will let it escalate until you do pay them, however long that takes. In this case, our daughter frowned at him and said, "No, grazie," with such perfect Italian pronunciation that he mistakenly thought we were locals, nodded a quick apology, took back his flowers, and melted away.

Our daughter grinned. "I only know four words of Italian," she said, "but I say them really well."

Later in the trip, she repeated her, "No, grazie," to a man selling something outside the Vatican. He replied, "prego," an Italian word that can mean "sorry," "excuse me," "I'm fine," or "You're next." Then, realizing she was American, he said, "Hey--your grazie is really good!"

Recently at my annual physical my doctor exhorted the benefits of a Mediterranean diet. Italy is of course surrounded by the Mediterranean--it's a boot in an azure sea--and so while in Rome I mostly confined myself to the major Italian food groups: cappucino, bread, pasta, cheese, gelato, and wine. And it worked: I lost a pound. Of course I also walked on average more than 22,000 steps per day. The only day I didn't hit 20,000 steps was the day my daughter was busy all day and so my husband I went to Pompeii. I confess to having been a little disappointed. When I was a child I read all about the amazing treasures unearthed at Pompeii--the jewelry, the statues, the household goods, not to mention all those macabre plaster casts of people who died during the volcanic eruption. What I didn't realize was that for 200 years people dug out the treasures and took them home with them, willy-nilly, so that they are everywhere except in Pompeii, which is now a very large rock village with no roofs, baking in the hot hot sun.

I'm still glad I saw it. I'm gladder still I then read a book about the excavation. I learned a lot of history combining those two, and it will inform my Egypt book, which I'm going back to, right now.

Prego.

Puppies for Everyone

I wasn't going to write a blog post today. I'd used up most of this week's allotment of rage, and I have things to do. I'm going to go to yoga and ride before it hits 90 degrees and write my Egypt book. In a perfect world I'll finish the wildly horrible, very long book whose review I have to write by this weekend (the rest of my rage can go right there).

OK I DIGRESS...I am DONE with the nasty brutish male character who roughly grabs the female character and is yelling nasty things and then suddenly kisses her, and she tries to resist but he persists, and then she melts in his arms because ohmygosh it's so sexy, the masculine virility...this in a YA book, this is what we are teaching our teens. It's sexy when someone grabs you and kisses you against your will.

Not.

Let's rewrite it. The nasty brutish male character roughly grabs the female character while yelling nasty things, and she blasts him with pepper spray, knees him in the gonads, and says, "That was almost felony assault, you jackass, don't you ever come near me again," and he learns his lesson the way a feral dog would do if you blasted it with pepper spray.

Yeah, ok, still got plenty of rage. It's been a tough week.

However, I have a puppy on my lap.

She weighs 10 pounds now. She weighed four when we got her. We have fallen into this little routine. She can make it through the night without peeing now, so I don't line her crate with puppy pads, but when she needs to go out it's sometimes a little earlier than I could wish, but at the same time it's really not negotiable. This morning it was still darkish when I went out, a week past the solstice. I've always loved early mornings. Good thing.

She goes out, then comes in and eats, then immediately goes out again. We walk down the hill to get the newspaper--it's like a puppy car wash, all the lush wet grass. I towel her off, which makes her growl tiny puppy protests. Then she goes into the breakfast nook--I've gated it--I make my breakfast and sit and eat it and read the paper. Usually my husband's eating breakfast too, though sometimes he's up a little earlier or later, depending on his schedule.

Then I carry the gate to my office and blockade my writing nook. I'm nearly past having to do this. She's quit using the backside of the loom as a toilet and has learned that books are not chew toys. Yesterday afternoon she had free range of the whole messy office for a few hours and did well. But for mornings I barricade the nook. She trots up to my feet, sits down, and makes a few tiny puppy barks. She can bark with the best of them when properly motivated, but in this case she's just talking to me, saying that she's ready for me to pick her up.

I put her on my lap. She sprawls out and takes a nap.

Really. This is what we do. I start my morning off with a puppy sleeping on my lap, and it's a great way to start the day.

The Other Term for 'Politically Correct' is 'Correct'

Kay. I woke up fierce this morning, astonished and appalled by how some people waste their precious limited time.

I'm serious. Sunday was my birthday and Monday was the funeral of someone I loved. I woke up in the middle of last night when my husband made a sudden noise and my heart flooded with gratitude--here I am, beside the man I've loved for thirty-five years.

It's been a hard spring for many people I care about. I can feel my perspectives shifting.

All over the internet, people who never heard of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Lifetime Achievement Award before this weekend are raising a big unholy fuss over thae changing of its name, acting as though this is just another step in a slippery slope that leads to--I don't know, what? Equality? Justice? Loving thy neighbor?

Folks, we're not saying that it's possible that the racist depictions in the Little House books might possibly someday be harmful to some kids. We're saying they are harmful to some kids. We're saying we know they have caused harm. And that therefore, a woman who died 61 years ago no longer gets to have this award named after her. She won it, its inaugural year. No one is taking that honor away from her.

But seriously, all the things to get upset about in this world, you're gonna pick that?

I'm not.

People are still dying from hunger in this world. People are dying from lack of medical care. People are dying from loneliness and mental illness and social injustice and sometimes they're dying for no reason at all, and I'm picking my battles carefully from here out.

When I was doing school visits this year, for the first time, a student asked me directly in a large group presentation, "Is Susan gay?"

When I said, "Yes," the room applauded. The entire room. It was clear to me that the students had talked about it beforehand and cared about my answer.

For the record, I was in a small conservative midwestern town. After my presentation, a girl came up to me, beaming, to thank me for Susan. Here's the thing: it wasn't because she was gay (she may or may not have been; she didn't say). It was because her parents were gay, and they were good parents, and it was important to her to see her family's reality reflected in books.

In my book The War I Finally Won, Susan, the loving adoptive gay parent, makes Ada write, one hundred times, "I will not continue to conflate lack of knowledge with lack of intelligence."

Here are my lines:
I will not revere the past at the expense of the present.
I will not equate skin color, religious belief, country of origin, sexual orientation, or gender identity with morality, virtue, intelligence or worth.
The mountain I die on will be worth the price.

We Don't Hate Laura Ingalls Wilder But I'm Glad We Dropped Her Name

On Saturday, the Association of Library Services for Children (ALSC), a division of the American Library Association, voted unanimously to rename their lifetime achievement award. It will now be called the Children's Literature Legacy Award instead of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award.

Laura Ingalls Wilder included racist passages in her books. You can argue all you like about whether this makes her a racist--though, if you read all her other writings, and the biographies written about her, it seems that she was--but you can't argue that having Ma say, repeatedly, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian," is not racist. And before you get up telling me that Laura was only writing down what her Ma actually said, hogwash. Laura decided what words to write and what stories to include. Her books were loosely autobiographical but not entirely.

The nine books were published from 1932 to 1953. They were at their peak of popularity during my childhood in the 1970s, around the time of the even-more-loosely-autobiographical, hugely schmaltzy TV show. I adored the books. I adored the series. I dressed as Laura Ingalls Wilder for Halloween.

The first time I read Gone With the Wind, when I was 18, I was captivated. (Yes, this post feels digressive. Stick with me). The sweeping story, the vivid characters, the fantastic historical backdrop--amazing. A few years later, when I was still in college, I picked it up to read it again. And I was horrified. I had learned to be a writer, had learned to examine carefully the choices writers made.

The same thing happened with the Little House on the Prairie books. When I read them to my children, I found myself editing many of the passages. I found myself unable to say, "the only good Indian is a dead Indian." I thought of my college friend Jen, a Sioux (she's now principal of a reservation school). I couldn't really edit the passages where Pa dresses as a "darky" and performs in a minstrel show. I told my children why it wasn't considered okay to do that now, but I couldn't really explain to them why it was considered okay then.

I remember loving the Little House books, but the farther away I get from my childhood, the less I admire them. I'm grateful that ALSC changed the name of their award. I don't think that the highest possible honor in children's literature--the only thing that trumps the Newbery, the Prinz, the Caldecott--should be named after a woman whose words are offensive. There's a big internet kerfluffle from people who have only read the headlines. No one is banning the Little House books. No one is rewriting them.

If you're really upset about the name change, do this first: read the books again. All of them. Then get back to me.

We've renamed an award so that it reflects our current awareness of who our kid-lit audience actually is. Halleluia.