Human beans: a thought for Remembrance Day

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.

“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.”

A rat, a queen, some graffiti and rogue sunflowers

"I am very busy working on my sunflowers, and in reality I have nothing to say." Vincent van Gogh in a letter to Wilhelmina van Gogh, August 1888

Not long ago I came home to a story, “The Queen and The Rat,” chalked on the sidewalk by my sister and daughter. It remained for days, until the rain came, and I was impressed by how many people actually stopped and read it. I thought, wouldn’t it be wonderful to escape from my messy, hot little office and go spreading stories around the way a graffiti artist spreads paint, or a guerrilla gardener spreads seeds? Both of those things are happening a lot in my neighbourhood — sunflowers sprouting up along a new path laid by the railroad tracks, and graffiti raccoons climbing up the posts of the bridge.

There is good graffiti, and bad, in more ways than one. Recently my husband helped out on a friend’s documentary of graffiti art, and learned about a police officer who acts as a “Legal Graffiti Art Coordinator.” There’s a concerted effort, it seems, not just to eradicate graffiti, but to redirect it. The Toronto Police website states that “numerous studies have concluded that ‘murals’ reduce continued vandal graffiti on a surface by as much as 77%.” Of course, there are good murals, and bad. And even mediocre, which is perhaps worst of all.

Luckily for me, one of the loveliest I’ve seen is right in my neighbourhood. It stretches along both sides of an otherwise lackluster strip of Bloor Street, and was painted by Toronto artist Richard Mongiat. The beautiful cones, trees, and branches, painted in stark blacks and whites and muted greys, are laid right on to the bare concrete. I was struck by this right away — by how gorgeous the concrete was, with all its nicks and scars, and how smart it was to make the wall an integral part of the piece, rather than just a surface to paint on. I think Richard Mongiat should paint the whole city of Toronto.

A section of Mongiat's mural in Toronto's west end

But perhaps not, because then there wouldn’t be room for other great mural projects, one of which appeared along Dupont Street, as part of the Art Starts Program.

Entitled “Strength in Numbers,” the mural declares that “only together can we forge a strong, safe and proud place to live.” It was funded through the City of Toronto’s Graffiti Transformation Investment Program, and features cyclists in all their variety — the speedy ones pressing into the wind and the slow-moving dress-wearing riders with baskets tied on to their “oma-fiets”. (In Holland, that’s what the old-fashioned upright bikes are called — “grandma-bikes”.) There’s a Canada goose too — this is one of my favourite parts of the mural, because the goose and its “HONK!” appeared not long before work on the mural began, and the group liked it so much they decided to incorporate it into the piece.

The kids who put the mural together, under the guidance of artists, chose a bicycle theme, appropriate for several reasons. Artist Galen Kuellmer was killed while cycling along this stretch several years ago. The wall runs alongside a new, much-needed bike path and also beneath the West Toronto Railpath, which has quickly become a popular spot for cyclists and pedestrians alike.

It was a treat watching the images come together, and to see some of the kids sitting on the wall across from their work, taking a break and looking at it all from the perspective of a passerby. Days later, someone vandalized the images, but they were quickly repaired, and not a trace of the vandalism remains. (For more about the story behind the Dupont mural, visit spacingtoronto.)

Part of the bike mural along Dupont

But back to the appealing notion of spreading stories. Here is “The Queen and The Rat,” originally written in vulnerable chalk but safe, now, from the elements:

Once upon a time in a little village in the big city there lived a queen who was having a problem with a rat. The queen demanded the rat wipe its feet to keep the palace clean! The rat said, Only if I can use the golden towel, and the queen said, I am using the golden one to polish my lovely lips. The rat thought this was a silly waste of time as the only thing the queen used her lips for was to eat and to order people around.

The rat and the queen could not agree so they decided to meet in the garden outside the palace. After a while of chatting they could see that what was more important than clean clean floors and polished lips was a smile and a chat in a garden or on a street or in a house.

So they threw away the golden towel and kept chatting.

Open here and start

I recently rediscovered a pile of old stories and drawings I’d made when I was about the age my daughter is now. She, too, loves to make “books,” and whenever we end up in a conversation with someone about the fact that I am a writer, she pipes up, “I’m a writer too.” Sometimes we take one of her homemade books to the library, and sneak it on to a shelf, as in Daniel Kirk’s Library Mouse, in the hopes another reader will discover and enjoy it. It strikes me that she is very conscious of the book itself, not just the story it contains. She’s aware of the author and, when applicable, the illustrator. She talks about the cover and the flap that protects it (and wraps her own creations in plastic so they won’t stand out from the rest on the shelf); she’s aware of the chapter titles and the page numbers, and she loves bookmarks.

Some of my own first books contain instructions:

before moving into the actual world of the story. This particular example comes from my version of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Ugly Duckling, and it’s interesting for me to see that such a story continued to fascinate me for decades. One of these days I will post a more updated version of The Ugly Duckling, about a boy who runs away from home. But for now, here is my first try, circa 1972.

I love the line “it wasn’t a chicken at all” — actually I used it again later, but more about that another time. I also love the red checkmark at the end — how good it must have felt to see that. The equivalent of a great review these days, or a kind letter from a reader.

Lately, as September approaches, I’m excited for my daughter to start Grade One and be in school full time. She is in for so many adventures, and I get to watch all of that unfold. September has that odd mix of beginning and ending about it — a melancholy feeling and a wide open sense of possibility at the same time. It’s strange how that lasts, for so many people, into adulthood.

I’m looking forward to my own “open here and start” when she is off to school, too. Although I’ve written all through the last six years, I’ve had to use pockets of time and wee hours (again, like Library Mouse, who works through the night in the school library, experimenting with various genres). I remember cradling my newborn on my lap while I tinkered on the last drafts of Origin of Haloes. And nearly falling asleep at my desk during The Occupied Garden. Now the days will be clear and consistent; structured. But as is the way with milestones, there is something lost here too.

Extra funny, extra sad: the fear of extraneousness

From ''Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine'' by Guillaume Duchenne, 1862

My husband (in my opinion a delightfully funny man) likes to joke that I have no sense of humour — it isn’t my fault, he says soothingly. It might be my Dutch background. When he brings home funny movies, he holds them up and says “Not available in the Netherlands!”

It’s true that for the most part I don’t like funny movies or funny TV shows, or at least the ones that are billed as comedies. I cringe at most stand-up comedy, where the jokes are rolled out one after another and the audience sits gawking and guffawing in all the right spots. But I do love to laugh. I think the best humour is woven in with other things, so that it surprises you when it comes. I guess my funny bone is particular, like my sweet tooth. I don’t like sweet desserts, but sweet with salty, with bitter, with sour, can be delicious.

Recently we watched two seasons of the show Extras, in which English comedian Ricky Gervais portrays a lowly extra, Andy Millman, who eventually soars to fame by playing a character he comes to despise. He gives up on his integrity, and dismisses his closest relationships, which have become irrelevant — extraneous. I liked Gervais’ earlier series, The Office, but I didn’t expect that this one, with its parade of enormously famous stars (David Bowie, Robert de Niro, Clive Owen, Kate Winslet), would really pull me in. So I watched most of the episodes with one eye on the TV and the other on the newspaper. I laughed occasionally while my husband dissolved into hysterics beside me.

And then came the series finale. Andy Millman’s fame has peaked and is now on the downward spiral. He begins taking every opportunity to claw his way up to a more respectable level of celebrity, but of course it’s the slipperiest of slopes. He winds up on a reality TV show, with a bunch of “stars” he’s never heard of, and they all sit around talking about themselves and imagining their futures, which, for one woman who likes to rhyme off all of the famous people she’s slept with, includes a celebrity wedding for which Hello! picks up the tab. “Andy, will you come to my Hello! wedding?” she asks. This sets Andy off on a fabulous rant about the pointlessness of “selling ourselves … selling everything,” and living life’s most personal moments out in the open.

“What are we doing?” he asks.

Partway through, the tears were streaming down my face. Not funny tears, but real weeping tears. I turned to my husband and said, “Now this is the kind of comedy I can appreciate!” (Which should prove that I do indeed have a sense of humour.)

This show expertly reveals the emptiness inside that desperate search for recognition. And that sense of desperation, I think, is something most of us can relate to, whatever our career or situation. It’s easy (not to mention painful) to fall into the trap of determining your own self worth by what the wrong “audience” thinks of you. Watching Extras, I was reminded of those excellent children’s books, Frog and Toad, which should perhaps be required reading for all ages.

In one story, “The Dream,” Toad falls asleep and imagines himself on stage in a large theatre, wearing a grand costume and a feathery hat. Only Frog, his loyal companion, is in the audience, cheering Toad on. A voice introduces each of Toad’s acts and Toad plays the piano magnificently, walks on tight rope, and dances, calling out each time, “Frog, can you do this?” Each time Frog answers “No,” and grows smaller and smaller, his voice fainter and fainter, until finally Toad cannot see him or hear him at all. The booming voice begins to announce Toad’s next amazing accomplishment, but humbled Toad is “spinning in the dark,” fearing he’s lost his one true friend.

Arnold Lobel died in the ’80s, but a few of his handmade books — crafted as gifts for a friend — were recently discovered by a rare books collector, and offer a window into the beginnings of these classic kids’ tales. Click for more about this chance find.