Somehow or other it comes just the same

We’ve already cracked open one of our favourite Christmas stories here at home: How the Grinch Stole Christmas. My daughter’s birthday is in early December, and we’ve taken to finishing the party with a raucous reading of that book — I’m the narrator, and my husband transforms into the Grinch himself, reciting all the Grinch lines and doing the faces too. It’s amazing how he actually does begin to look green. His heart is small and shriveled at the beginning of the story, and he hunches himself around it as he slinks through the living room giving the children evil stares — and then his hand cups his ear by the end of the story, and his ballooning heart thumps under his sweater. This is that key moment I mentioned in my last post, when the Grinch changes course not because he can get something out of it — in fact he loses all the “things” he’s acquired — but simply because he is moved by goodness. He sees it actually isn’t possible to steal Christmas. “Somehow or other, it came just the same.”

Last year, steeped as we were in Christmas stories and movies and shows, my husband and I noticed how prevalent was the theme of “what’s in it for me,” and got into quite a discussion as we discovered just how true it was that the Grinch was a cut above other villains.

Scrooge's third visitor, by John Leech, 1843

There’s the classic one — Dickens’ Scrooge, who is terrorized into kindness and compassion by the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present, and most ominously the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. Dickens himself would probably have loved Alastair Sim in this role in the 1951 movie version of A Christmas Carol. He gets all of the expressions just right, and oozes a bah,  humbug quality. It’s likely that Theodor Seuss Geisel had Scrooge in mind when he developed his Grinch, but the difference between the two curmudgeons lies in what motivates them to change.

Scrooge extraordinaire. It's best not to mention Jim Carrey...

And think of Professor Hinkle in Frosty the Snowman. Frosty was originally a simple little song first recorded by Gene Autry in 1950, but by the 60s it had morphed into the film we still see on television at this time of year. The enlarged story included Hinkle, a magician who fails to realize the magical properties of his hat before tossing it aside, and is now determined to retrieve it as he chases Frosty and friends on foot and by train to the North Pole. Of course, the gang eventually ends up encountering Santa himself, who tells Hinkle that if he repents, he’ll get a little something in his stocking Christmas Day.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer started out as a story in 1939. Its author, Robert L. May, used The Ugly Duckling tale as inspiration, and you can certainly still see links between the two, even though the 1960s television version took Rudolph in some new directions. The show is still big with kids at Christmas, and we love it too, for a number of reasons — the charming stop-motion animation, the Island of Misfit Toys, gravelly-voiced Yukon Cornelius, and the unexpected detail of an elf who’d rather be a dentist. And yet, once my husband and I got going on our what’s-in-it-for-me-investigation, we realized the theory held true here as well. After all of Rudolph’s adventures, when he finally returns home, he is only really accepted by Santa and the rest because they realize his glowing nose will guide them through the storm. He is useful to them, and so welcome.

The doctor draws the Grinch's puzzler

“Your mother can’t be with you anymore…”

Dramatic tension is essential for holding the interest of jack russells

Years ago, when my daughter and I first began drawing faces together, she discovered how easily tears could be added, and she would implore me, “Mommy, draw girl crying!” and I would do the round circle head, the eyes, the down-turned mouth, and last of all, the tears. My daughter is, and was then, a happy, sociable, energetic child, but during that phase she would have watched Bambi every day if I let her. Among her favourite books were the ones I mentioned in my last post, which have happy endings but go to dark places along the way — the threat of being eaten or embedded in stone. Such stories are still the ones she wants to hear again and again, long after the cute, sweet, light stories have been shelved and forgotten.

Babar is riding happily on his mother's back when...

I like to muse about why children want these stories; when (if) they can be too much; how parents should handle the emotions they expose, and the inevitable questions they instigate. For instance, it took my daughter a long time to understand what the gunshot meant in Bambi, and to know what to do with the knowledge. When we read Babar, the story of an elephant whose mother is killed by a hunter, she immediately stopped me and asked, “Do hunters take moms away? Are there hunters in Toronto?” And for the rest of the book, she kept flipping back to that page where Babar’s mother was shot.

For weeks after the Bambi penny dropped, she’d ask, “Did you lock the door?” as soon as we got home. And then I started to hear her role-playing with her stuffed animals, and having one say to the other, “Your mother is not coming back. Your mother is never coming back.” (For a time I worried, but she is turning out just fine.)

Bambi, A Life in the Woods, by Felix Salten

First released in 1942, the movie Bambi holds up well today, and the book, originally published in Austria in 1923, is considered a classic and often referred to as one of the first environmental novels. Apparently its author, Felix Salten, wrote the story with an adult audience in mind, and indeed the Wall Street Journal reported that “you’ll find it in the children’s section at the library, a perfect place for this 293-page volume, packed as it is with blood-and-guts action, sexual conquest and betrayal.”

Salten was in his fifties by the time he wrote Bambi, A Life in the Woods, and had been writing plays, short stories, novels, and essays for years. But his books were banned by the Nazi regime in 1936, and as a Jew he was forced to leave Austria for Switzerland, where he remained until his death in 1945 — just three years after Disney released the animated version of his story, featuring a white-tailed deer rather than a roe, but retaining the heartbreaking scene in which “your mother can’t be with you anymore.”

Plate I from Darwin's Expression of the Emotions

I once met a grandmother who told me she didn’t think her toddler grandson should read How the Grinch Stole Christmas because she believed it was best to expose him only to happiness at his tender age. So that he would only be happy, I guess. But not even babies are “only happy.” In fact, you might argue that happiness is one of the more rare baby emotions. It takes weeks for a baby to smile; the wait is longer for laughter. (Said Charles Darwin, upon observing his own babies for The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, “In this gradual acquirement, by infants, of the habit of laughing, we have a case in some degree analogous to that of weeping. As practice is requisite with the ordinary movements of the body, such as walking, so it seems to be with laughing and weeping. The art of screaming, on the other hand, from being of service to infants, has become finely developed from the first days.”)

Actually — if one is looking for good messages in children’s literature, the Grinch is a stellar example. This is one of the rare Christmas stories in which the protagonist comes around not out of self interest or self preservation, but simply because he is moved by goodness. But I’ll save that for a December post.

Pebbles and bones: the nitty-gritty of telling good stories

Even (perhaps especially) twenty-two-year-old cats love to be read to...

My daughter, almost six now, is hungry for big books these days — she still likes a few pictures here and there, but they are not essential. And she loves a long, meaty story. Yet there are still picture books that we return to on a regular basis, and I hope we do so for some time. Among our (or maybe my?) favourites are William Steig’s books, with deliciously dark but also tender themes.

In The Amazing Bone, Pearl, a very girly I-love-everything pig clad in pink bonnet and dress, is abducted by a suave suited fox, and locked into an empty room in his hideaway while he sharpens his knives by the stove that will roast her if she doesn’t escape.  A talking bone she has found along the way is her only ally — it can speak in any language and imitate any sound there is. The premise is totally bizarre, which even Pearl realizes.

“You’re a bone,” she says. “How come you can sneeze?”

“I don’t know,” the bone replies. “I didn’t make the world.”

I love that line, and the way Steig examines the baffling human condition to resonate with adult and child alike.  Pearl’s story is full of contrasts: the bright, beautiful spring, in which Pearl “could almost feel herself changing into a flower”; the band of masked highway  robbers she encounters, carrying pistols and daggers and demanding her purse. It’s heavy stuff — you could easily take the skeleton of this story and turn it into a terrifying thriller, but the pretty pig and the talking bone and the flowers soften the edges just the right amount.

"The spring green sparkled in the spring light"

It seems Steig understood he’d have a lot more freedom with his stories if his characters were animal rather than human.  In The Minstrel Steig, Roger Angell’s New Yorker article about Steig’s life and career, Steig says, “I realized that I could get crazier with animals and have them do stranger things.” So many authors have done this — but Steig does it with wit, dignity, and style, in a highly original way.

"They all had all that they wanted"

In Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, Sylvester is a donkey who, in a fearful moment, uses his magic pebble to wish himself into a rock, only to find that he can’t escape back into donkeyness again. As day changes to night, season to season, doomed Sylvester loses hope and falls into “an endless sleep.” His parents grieve, wondering what’s become of him.  They weep, and they look everywhere for him as the months pass. Finally it seems impossible he will ever return.

“They tried their best to be happy, to go about their usual ways. But their usual ways included Sylvester and they were always reminded of him. They were miserable. Life had no meaning for them anymore.”

This brilliant story was Steig’s second book for children — it won the Caldecott Medal and was selected as one of the 100 Best Books of the Century by the National Education Association. The illustrations glow, and the story captures every family’s worst fear — that somehow child and parent will be separated. But there’s a happy ending, with the lovely double-all line, “They all had all that they wanted.”

Steig wrote and illustrated more than thirty novels and picture books for children, including the Doctor De Soto series, featuring a dentist mouse, and the Shrek! story, so enormously successful on film. My personal favourite, though, is the quieter Brave Irene, which features a human girl as the main character, charged with delivering a Duchess’s ball gown in a snowstorm because her mother falls ill with a cold and can’t do it herself.

So many of Steig’s stories seem in essence to be about courage and survival. What’s refreshing is that they are never sentimental, or condescending to the child reader. Steig uses words like “odoriferous,” which kids likely won’t know, but he trusts them to get what he means anyway. And they do. They have for decades.

Steig was in his sixties by the time he wrote his first children’s book. By then he’d already had a long career as a cartoonist with The New Yorker. He sold his first drawing to the magazine in 1930, and continued to contribute late into his life. So though it was a different market, I’m sure it came as no surprise that his children’s drawings were wonderful — but beyond that, he was a superb storyteller. Early in his newfound career, he wrote to an editor, “I hope you’ll understand if I tell you that I tend to be a bit ‘uptight’, even neurotic perhaps, about being edited. It’s not vanity — I don’t think I’m a great writer, or even a good one (in fact, I’m not a writer) — but I like to sound like myself when I talk or write.”

Just a week after his death in 2003, his wife Jeanne wrote a touching essay about him in the New York Times, calling him both “a champion worrier” and “the most cheerful man alive.” She claimed, “He drew from an impulse that went straight from the heart to his moving hand — and he always watched that hand with delight, wanting to see what it was up to. The interpretations others might bring surprised him. Really? he’d say, and make haste to forget whatever metaphysical visions had been assigned to him. He didn’t need them; they got in the way.”

Human beans: grizzling and horrigust?

After finishing off Return to the Hundred Acre Wood, I urged my daughter toward Black Beauty, thinking it was a nice fit, because recently we acquired a dog who, like the horse in Anna Sewell’s novel, has been mistreated. But more about that another time, because N said no to Black Beauty and insisted (once again) on Roald Dahl’s The BFG — in which the little girl Sophie is kidnapped from her bedroom by a giant who lurks around on dark streets and blows dreams into children’s windows.

In all good conscience I couldn’t very well say “Mommy has already mentioned The BFG on her blog several times, so we’ll have to read something else.” And anyway, it’s probably time for a confession about my own fascination with giants. My new novel, still very much underway, has a giant girl as the  main character.

For this reason, we have books around our house that show pictures of real giants — the “boy giant” Robert Wadlow, who soared past eight feet in height, and weighed nearly four hundred pounds; and the enormous Sandy Allen, seven feet, seven inches, and beautiful when Fellini cast her as his giantess in Casanova. The Wadlow book shows a photo of him touching the top of a streetlight in New York City, with a gaggle of little New Yorkers around him, and for days afterwards, whenever we passed a traffic light, my daughter would say, “A giant could reach that high.”

In my research for the novel, I was intrigued to discover the links between storybook giants and actual giants, whose condition is caused by a pituitary tumour that causes excess growth hormone in the body. So the traits we so often see in stories like Jack and the Beanstalk exist in real life too. Fleshy lips and ears; a pronounced forehead and heavy jaw; poor vision; a deep, hoarse voice; a hunched back; a cane (in stories, a club) for support.

I won’t give more away here, except to say that I’m easily persuaded when N wants another read of The BFG, and tucked away in her second-floor bedroom, we imagine him (one of children’s literature’s most endearing characters, in my opinion) stooping way down to peer through the window at us.

Roald Dahl’s giant lives in Giant Country, but he’s an anomaly there too. His fellow giants are twice as tall as he is, and they all dine on human beans, especially delectable little chiddlers, while the BFG, a conscientious but non-judgmental vegetarian, eats only icky snozzcumbers and drinks frobscottle, a beverage whose fizzes go down instead of up and therefore give him gassy whizzpoppers that are one of his few sources of happiness. Until Sophie comes along, that is.  When the bespectacled little orphan is scooped “hipswitch” out of the orphanage by the giant, both their lives change forever.

One of my favourite passages has Sophie discovering, to her horror, that the giants of giant land eat humans. And while the BFG believes it’s wrong to guzzle human beans, he is quick to point out her hypocrisy. Humans eat pigs, he says, although the pigs probably don’t like it very much. And besides that –

“I is not understanding human beans at all…. You is a human bean and you is saying it is grizzling and horrigust for giants to be eating human beans…. But human beans is squishing each other all the time. They is shootling guns and going up in aerioplanes to drop their bombs on each other’s heads every week. Human beans is always killing other human beans…. Giants is not very lovely, but they is not killing each other. Nor is crockadowndillies killing other crockadowndillies. Nor is pussy-cats killing pussy-cats…. Human beans is the only animals that is killing their own kind.”

Which seems an appropriate thought for Remembrance Day.

Roald Dahl was a member of the Royal Air Force in WW2. He stretched to six feet, six inches, and must have been quite a sight crouched into the cockpit of a warplane. He survived a crash in the desert, but was transferred home to England due to his injuries. Eventually he ended up at a desk in Washington, which must have seemed somewhat unadventurous, and yet it was here that his career really took a turn. He was asked to lunch by C.S. Forester, who requested some information about his war experience. If he could jot down some notes, Forester would then take what he’d written and transform it into a piece for The Saturday Evening Post.

As it turned out, the pilot had a way with the pen. When Forester received Dahl’s musings, he sent along a note saying “Did you know you were a writer? — I haven’t changed a word.” And the piece was published as “Shot Down Over Libya”  in the August 1942 edition of The Saturday Evening Post (though it isn’t true that Dahl was shot down — he was already on his way to a great career in fiction).

The war remained an inspiration. A year later, Disney published his first children’s book, The Gremlins, about a group of mischievous creatures who wreak havoc in the plane-filled skies of World War Two. In keep with Remembrance Day, it fits to mention that his memoir Going Solo gives a detailed account of his wartime experience.

And I can’t close without saying something about Quentin Blake, who illustrated so many of Dahl’s books. You would think, reading The BFG and others, that the words and the pictures came from one mind, they fit that well together. My daughter loves to draw, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen her quite as inspired as she was when we first read The BFG. She was torn between her wish for another chapter, and her wish for a break so she could go and sketch out her own version of Blake’s giant and the little Sophie in her nightgown.

Blake was still a boy when Dahl was crash-landing his warplanes, but what a treat to find that his first published drawings appeared in Punch magazine when he was just a teenager — remember this was home for A.A. Milne and Ernest Shepard early in their careers. Later on, Blake illustrated for a number of other writers, and like Shepard was an author in his own right. In our house, we adore his story Mrs. Armitage on Wheels. The Daily Telegraph wrote that “Blake is beyond brilliant. He’s anarchic, moral, infinitely subversive, sometimes vicious, socially acute, sparse when he has to be, exuberantly lavish in the detail when he feels like it. He can tell wonderful stories without a single word, but his partnership with Roald Dahl was made in heaven. Or somewhere.”

Well — we concur.

For more about Quentin Blake, click here. Visit Dahl’s whizzpopping website here. Read Elizabeth Renzetti’s Fantastic Mr. Dahl.

“If a writer, why not write?” in which A.A. Milne shows Eeyore traits and Dorothy Parker throws up

A.A. Milne, author of more than Pooh

“The only excuse which I have yet discovered for writing anything is that I want to write it; and I should be as proud to be delivered of a Telephone Directory con amore as I should be ashamed to create a Blank Verse Tragedy at the bidding of others.”

There’s a lot tucked away in this one sentence of Alan Alexander Milne’s.  The quote comes from his introduction to his  whodunit, The Red House Mystery, published in 1922. Milne was about 40 then, with a wife and young son Christopher Robin, who would soon inspire the Pooh stories for which Milne is now so well known.  You can see a glimmer of them here, in the way the words Telephone Directory and Blank Verse Tragedy are capitalized. (“I have been Foolish and Deluded. I am a Bear of No Brain at All.”)

Interesting, too, this musing on what he should and should not write. What he’d feel proud or ashamed of. He worked many years for Punch magazine, as did Ernest Howard Shepard, who illustrated Milne’s children’s stories. Milne also wrote a number of plays, an autobiography, short stories, novels, political non-fiction, and a kind of adult fairytale called Once on a Time. But the world of the Hundred Acre Wood — containing his son, and a bear, pig, donkey, tiger and kangaroo bought at Harod’s — quickly came to define him.

Milne himself lamented:

If a writer, why not write
On whatever comes in sight?
So — the Children’s Books; a short
Intermezzo of a sort:
When I wrote them, little thinking
All my years of pen-and-inking
Would be almost lost among
Those four trifles for the young.

I wonder what he would think of the new book by David Benedictus, Return to the Hundred Acre Wood, complete with Shepardesque “decorations” by Mark Burgess. The story picks up where Milne left off, and brings Christopher Robin back from school on a new blue bicycle that all his animal friends admire. Christopher is more grown up than he was in the early stories — he knows what a thesaurus can do,  and notices things like the number of countries on his map that are coloured pink. But in some ways he remains the same: Pooh, staying with him that night, sits on a chair in the bathroom. “What he really wanted to see was whether he still wore his blue braces, and, yes, he did (but not in the bath).”

Return to the Hundred Acre Wood is lovingly and carefully created. Benedictus mimics Milne’s style effortlessly and with obvious admiration, and Burgess’s illustrations are as subtle and charming as Shepard’s were. There’s a new character, Lottie the somewhat feisty Otter, whose teeth are “sharp enough, I can promise you, when they need to be.” These are all things to admire (the but is still to come) and my daughter is enjoying the book as much as she enjoyed the original stories, maybe more, because she’s older now and getting more out of the readings. Piglet is still her favourite character (I think she sees herself in him), and she is intrigued by Owl’s spelling mistakes, something that would have been lost on her when we last read the original stories.

Poor her: the Tonstant Weader

She is delighted by the very things that so famously irritated Dorothy Parker — the “frequent droppings into more cadenced whimsy,” as she put it in her scathing New Yorker review of The House at Pooh Corner back in 1928. Parker was known as the Constant Reader, but had read enough when it came to Pooh’s silly little hums and a plot that consisted of practicing one for Eeyore.

“Pom,” said Pooh. “I put that in to make it more hummy.”

And in response, Parker wrote, “it is that word ‘hummy,’ my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed Up.”

In the words of a wise, good friend of mine: “Poor her, unable to enjoy a simple hum.”

But even Milne may have reached that stage eventually. His Pooh stories — though an “intermezzo” — became so successful that they eclipsed his other work. During WW2, demand for the Pooh stories soared, and only continued in the postwar era. Now, of course, we have tubby Disney Pooh in his too-tight red t-shirt, and any number of Pooh products are available for purchase. At one point, Milne wrote that any reference to the silly old bear was “infuriating.”

The real Christopher Robin

And Christopher Robin — a real person, after all — was indelibly inked into childhood by a kind but distant father who “got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders … [and] left me with the empty fame of being his son…. One day I will write verses about him and see how he likes it.” (Actually Christopher Robin Milne did write three books about sharing his life with Pooh.)

It seems E.H. Shepard was similarly undone. Pooh — whose image was based on Shepard’s son’s bear, Growler — dominated, while Shepard’s other accomplishments were thrown into shadow. He drew for Punch for years, illustrated many other children’s books, including a couple of his own. He also authored two memoirs, Drawn from Memory and Drawn from Life. It seems his talents — or perhap his passion — ran in the family. His son, Graham, was an illustrator, but was killed in WW2, and his daughter, Mary, illustrated the Mary Poppins books.

Grahame's Dream Days, illustrated by E.H. Shepard

I was surprised to discover my own personal link to Shepard, however tangential. Along with the lovely example at right, he illustrated a version of Tom Brown’s School-Days, the Victorian-era story about a boy at Rugby School, by Thomas Hughes. Hughes was the father of Lillian Hughes, who died on the Titanic, but years earlier had befriended my great-grandmother. My grandmother’s middle name was Lillian, in honour of her.

But back to the story at hand. As I read Return to the Hundred Acre Wood, much as I enjoy Lottie, and Rabbit undertaking a census, and the Bear with no Brain outsmarting a swarm of bees, I can’t help but think back to the way the old tale ended — with Christopher Robin’s poignant declaration that he wouldn’t be “doing Nothing” any more, and that he hoped Pooh would understand. It was mysterious, but you got the sense that he was growing up, moving on — and that it was time to do so — but that some part of him would always remain in that enchanted place with his Bear. Really it seems like a perfect ending.

Blog of green gables?

I’m not a children’s writer, but I am a writer and the mother of a small child, and so my world has been filled with children’s books for the last many years. From the beginning, I’ve loved reading with my daughter – because of the intimacy, because of how much she enjoys it, because of my interest in stories in general. But also because the books open a window on to childhood, and give me new ways of considering my own work. Though written for adults, each of my novels has featured children among the main characters, and I am always intrigued by the child as narrator, protagonist, and, of course, listener.

I’m not always the reader in this house. Sometimes I eavesdrop when my husband reads aloud, and increasingly, the smallest among us can figure out the words on her own. Sometimes we even sit side by side with our individual books open, together but separate, too, as we turn the pages.

I’ve often thought that if I could take time away to study anything, it would be children’s literature. And in a sense I guess I am studying it, as my daughter moves through the years reading new books and classics alike. I can see how the stories help broaden her perspective, and give her new puzzles to solve, or at least contemplate, about the real world. And I remember my own early days of reading — the small green stools at the library, placed around child-sized tables. Shelf after shelf of books, about endless numbers of things. I loved the way the children’s section looked down on the wide open main floor, where grown-ups sat on couches reading newspapers and magazines, close by but a world away.

Frances Hodgson Burnett, of Secret fame

The stories we read together at our house have come up now and again on this blog – Frog and Toad, The BFG, The Secret Garden – and it always occurs to me that there is so much more to say about these books and the people who created them — Roald Dahl was a Wing Commander in WW2,  learned Norwegian myths from his mother, and wrote macabre short stories for adults as well as his kids’ books; Frances Hodgson Burnett grew up in a Manchester slum — she later supported her siblings with her writing income, and divorced two husbands in a span of four years.

I’ve decided to make a shift in the next while, and start a series of meandering posts on children’s books and their authors, and the kinds of things that come up when we share stories in our house. (For instance “Pooh,” here, is pronounced “Poo-huh,” by someone who is busy discovering the many surprises of the English language.) I hope this series will still give me the freedom to muse about Vincent van Gogh and Charles Darwin, or maybe A. A. Milne and L. M. Montgomery. However things unfold, I’m looking forward to charting our progress through stories, and to hearing what others think about the many subjects we’ll touch on.

So if you know some fans of great children’s literature, or parents who might like to follow along on our journey, please pass on the link. And think back on your own childhood – what were your favourite books, and why?

The BFG catching dreams

The marvelous spiral of stories and snails

Last week I visited my daughter’s grade one-two class to talk about writing, and ended up talking about snails. It was a great morning — the teacher invited me in to tell the kids a bit about how  a book gets from inside an author’s head on to a book shelf, and I did so, bringing along a couple of my notebooks and a copy of Water Wings, my first novel. We talked about getting ideas from pictures in magazines and newspapers, and going outside and seeing how our surroundings are like moving pictures that can inspire us. Good writers know how to look and listen, I said, and they remember little details and transform them on paper.  A story can come out of anywhere.

For example, I said, one day my daughter N and her dad went out for a ride on their double bike. He had his big bicycle with her trail-a-bike attached to it, and they were zipping along the bicycle trail near our house when they happened along some snails, a whole line of them crossing the path. So they stopped and squatted down and examined the snails with their “marvelous spirals,” and then they set about saving them.  And afterwards I thought that would make a great little story, so I wrote it out and took pictures to go along with it.

“Would you like to hear that story?” I asked, and they said yes, so I read it.

And when I was finished, many hands shot up — with questions about snails! Most of them weren’t questions, actually, but comments. “Once my mom saw a snail and she almost stepped on it but she didn’t and she brought it home for me!” and “I have a bike like that” and  “Snails move along on a foot that’s sticky ” and “Did you bring any of the snails home?” and “You have to give them moisture because snails don’t like it dry” and “It’s good not to keep snails but to set them free because that helps the earth” and so on and so on. But what was interesting about all of this, was how simple it was to keep steering the conversation — keep spiraling it back — to writing stories, because of course every anecdote they related was in fact a story, or had the potential to be.

“I bet every one of you has a snail story somewhere inside you,” I said.

The morning ended with me getting to hear some of the stories they’d been working on, and I loved it, because kids have such a refreshing way of putting ideas into words and pictures.  It’s something I miss about my own stories sometimes, and don’t quite know how to recapture.

Things runnin’ wild an’ catchin’ hold of each other

Van Gogh's Vase with Autumn Asters, 1886

Right now my daughter and I are reading The Secret Garden, and I’m sure I’m enjoying it as much as she is. It’s a big, hardcover copy, with gorgeous illustrations by Inga Moore – which means the book swells to nearly 300 pages. Five-year-olds get pretty pleased with themselves when they know they’re reading such weighty tomes. We call it “Secret” for short, and snuggle up together each night for at least another chapter of the story (and I’m pretty certain, as with the BFG and so many other stories, we’ll be starting this one all over again when the book is done).

For those who don’t know this classic, or who’ve forgotten, Frances Hodgson Burnett brings us into the world of spoiled Mary Lennox, orphaned in India when her parents die – the deaths are no great loss as her parents didn’t really love her anyway, hence Mary’s surly attitude and sour expression. She’s sent back to England, to live in her uncle’s mansion, and discovers an equally spoiled, surly cousin, Colin, hidden away in one of the rooms, convinced he’s growing a hunchback, and unwilling to go outside. Colin’s mother died when Colin was born, and Colin’s father, sick with grief, hasn’t been able to look at him, let alone love him, in all of the boy’s ten years.

There are lots of love-starved people in The Secret Garden (which, funnily, my daughter first called The Occupied Garden). And then there is the boy Dickon, with his broad Yorkshire accent and keen understanding of the natural world. Dickon rides a wild pony, converses with robins, walks with a crow on his shoulder, and knows how to make himself look like grass and trees and bushes in order to put animals at east. He manages to make Mary laugh, too. Dickon’s idea of how a garden should look matches my own:

“I wouldn’t want to make it look like a gardener’s garden, all clipped an’ spick an’ span, would you? It’s nicer like this with things runnin’ wild, an’ swingin’ an’ catchin’ hold of each other.”

I think I’m enjoying this book so much partly because it’s just a great story, but also because gardens and the natural world have played such an important part in my own writing. That happened by accident; it was never my intention. I mentioned early on in this blog that I knew I wanted to write from a very early age – what I wanted to write about was harder to decipher. I studied journalism because I knew I wouldn’t be able to earn a living writing fiction (at least not right away). For a while I worked at a magazine, writing, proofreading, copyediting. My plan was to come home at night and launch into what I really wanted to write. But by the end of a long day, I found I had spent all my words at the office. I realized I needed a change, and happened upon a want ad for a floral designer: “no experience required, will train.”

This was a real stroke of luck – most shops want designers who already know what they’re doing, but this one, The Purple Orchid in Calgary, prided itself on doing things differently. They wanted someone to whom they could teach their own peculiar tricks of the trade, rather than someone who could churn out FTD arrangements. And they chose me – about twenty years ago now. I was surprised when my work at the flower shop brought me in touch with my Dutch roots. Flowers came packed in long boxes from Holland, and people with Dutch accents called on the telephone.

I often thought of my Opa back then, and how he had come to work in the flower growing industry when they’d come to Canada in the early 1950s. He was a prized employee, a kind of grown-up Dutch Dickon whose very presence seemed to make things thrive. That’s not true, of course: he was hardworking and diligent, and he knew what he was doing. For years he had grown vegetables in Holland, and then in a new chapter of his life he was tending roses and chrysanthemums, and appearing in advertisements for Jiffy Pots.

Anyhow – I entered the flower world thinking it would give me a clear head for writing, but I didn’t realize that it would actually become part of my work, tangled up with the words like virginia creeper. All of my novels are spun through with creeping thyme and moss and wildflowers, lilacs and white pines and spindly jack pines. Much of that is due to the landscape of my childhood, but also to my work at flower shops: first in Calgary, then on Granville Island in Vancouver, and finally at East of Eliza here in Toronto. I remember when I first walked into East of Eliza to drop off my resume, and saw the vases of overblown tulips dotted around the creaky old home that then housed the store. The petals were curling back and the stems had gone all twisted and strange – some would have said the flowers were done, but they looked so gorgeous and wild and natural in their state of decay that I knew right away this was the place for me. I worked there for many years, until I was able to start writing full time. It was a second home for me, and a place full of drama, really, because of the reasons people by flowers: love, death, marriage, birth, gratitude, betrayal. And I still feel a pull towards my flower shop days when I pass a store that has loads of them on display out front, and I smell the sweet-spicy mixed-up smell of all different kinds together.

Van Gogh's Butterflies and Poppies, 1890

Says Dickon, “Mignonette’s th’ sweetest smellin’ thing as grows an’ it’ll grow wherever you cast it, same as poppies will. Them as’ll come up an’ bloom if you just whistle to ’em, them’s the nicest of all.”

School of dark socks, school of dark thoughts

Dark socks hide the dirt, but might make for sad expressions

School was a long time ago now for me, as the picture attests. But somehow, every year, the back-to-school feeling twists in my belly. The smell in the air at this time of year; the end-of-summer breeze; the flowers forming their seedpods. Everything reminds me.

Zipping up my daughter’s stiff new pencil case takes me backwards in time and makes me think of the dark socks I wore when I really wanted white ones, and the chemical smell of the Xeroxed handouts with number puzzles on them that I didn’t understand. Too afraid to say, convinced I was already supposed to know, convinced, also, that I would never know, and everyone else would.

The back-to-school anxiety is a hard one for kids to figure out, because it is such a mix of nervousness and sheer excitement. The year (which really does begin in September) is wide open with possibility. At breakfast on the first day, my daughter asked, “What does nauseous mean?” And then when I answered, she said quietly, “I think I might be that.”

A few minutes after our discussion, my daughter went upstairs to brush her teeth, and my husband came down. He is a teacher, and has been one for many years. But between bites of toast and sips of coffee, he grimaced and said, “I’m nervous.” Later still, I heard from a friend who teaches at the graduate level, and she, too, confessed her queasiness. On a certain level, she said, it was performance anxiety. But it went deeper than that too — back through the fogginess of déjà vu to that more specific memory of school jitters. The years of schooling are so ingrained in us that the feeling never really leaves.

As a reader and speaker, I can relate to performance anxiety, and I know that if it doesn’t paralyze you, it can actually spur you on. But at a more basic gut level, I can also relate to my “nauseous” daughter, and everyone heading back to school. School puts us in a context: us among them. We stand out so strongly to ourselves that we can’t possibly imagine how we will fit in. The questions spin, and tangle with our nerves. What will they think of me, how will I know where to line up, what if I have to go to the bathroom, what if I need a partner and no one wants me, why do I have to wear dark socks, what’s in my sandwich and why isn’t anyone else eating yellow jam? One more question comes to mind. Why are we so afraid of each other?

I think the best definition of courage comes from L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. (I loved this book as a child, but have to admit as an adult that the movie is even better.) When the Cowardly Lion finally finds himself in front of the wizard, he still doesn’t realize he’s had what he seeks all along. “There is no living thing that is not afraid when it faces danger,” the wizard tells him. “The True courage is in facing danger when you are afraid, and that kind of courage you have in plenty.”

Dorothy meets the Cowardly Lion, from the first edition, 1900, by WW Denslow

When our legs grew out of our heads

Creepy stone bunny stumbled upon in the forest sometime last century

Once upon a time I used a Polaroid camera and went around taking pictures of things that inspired me. Mossy tombstones and cabbage moths and trees growing in strange places. It was so satisfying, the way the image slid out of the camera, presented in a tidy white frame. Often I liked the mistakes best — the things that showed up in the image that I hadn’t expected.

I don’t take so many photographs anymore, but there are days when I’m out walking that I mentally collect images. I can feel a kind of shutter clicking in my mind when I see certain things: a man strolling across the street from his apartment building in shorts, t-shirt and fuzzy brown slippers, cigarette tucked behind his ear. When I click my imaginary camera, the corner store at the other side of the street is visible in the frame, and I know he’s going to get matches. He can’t be bothered to put shoes on. I store the image away in that mysterious place where stories gather.

I have piles of dusty old photos getting blurry over time. When I open the box I keep them in, I smell the toxic smell of a Polaroid photo ripped open — because for a while this is what I would do to the odd photo, tear the white frame off and take the backing away so I could see the wall through the image pinned on it.  Now our walls are full of children’s drawings instead. But I sense a parallel in the way my daughter collects images. We come home from any number of adventures and she draws what she remembers — what stood out to her from the day. Or we read the Roald Dahl’s The BFG (Big Friendly Giant) and she draws the pictures in a style surprisingly like Quentin Blake.

Chapter Two: Sophie meets the BFG

It’s amazing to watch the stages of a child’s drawing — from squiggly, nonsensical lines to somewhat recognizable shapes, and then to heads with legs growing out of them. And then to curly eyelashes and lips and people in profile and landscapes that show an understanding of perspective. Apparently the stages are remarkably similar for most children, and have names like “pre-tadpole” and “tadpole” — the latter being a circle with at least two lines coming out of it.

The AAA Lab at Stanford sees it this way: “A common explanation for the ubiquitous tadpole stage is that children are merely trying to symbolize a person and do not put a premium on realism. While this may be true, it does not explain the specific tadpole form…. when children look down at their bodies, they see their arms coming from their head. (Stretch your arms to the side and then look down.) Therefore, early on, children draw pictures combining their head and body as one component. ” Check out the Lab’s children’s drawing page for more.

Unhappy tadpole?

Just as an aside, check out The Impossible Project, which intends to bring new life to the Polaroid camera and its factory in Enschede, NL. The site lays out the history and the challenges ahead, and quotes the inventor of instant photography, Edwin Land: “Don’t undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.”