Good will triumph (2)

The two most important ingredients of any children's book, according to Jane Yolen,  are - hope and joy.







BELIEVE








"Beneath the muck and scum of things, there something always, always sings."  Emerson

Good will triumph

Julian of Norwich was a medieval, English mystic, who maintained that :

"All shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."

Madeleine L'Engle believed that this "all wellness" should be at the heart of every single children's book. 

But what does it mean, this "all wellness?"

Well, maybe it is easier to begin with what it does NOT mean.  I do not think it means that we have to feed children some naïve, Pollyanna, pie-in-the-sky stories that completely disregard the sadnesses that simmer beneath our lives.

Rather I think it has to do with having a stalwart belief in what all good stories from the Chronicles of Narnia to the Harry Potter series center around - and that is, despite our troubled times and dark days, despite the evil doers and the naysayers of the world, despite all of that....

GOOD is more powerful than Evil....

LOVE can conquer Hate

HOPE is what we humans DO (even if we do not always feel it)

Love and Friendship 4

Friends are the Elixir of Life! 

 

 

Whether it is Pooh Bear and Piglet, Charlotte and Wilbur, or Amos and Boris, we know that good friends can look very different on the outside - after all, opposites attract! 

 

We also know that good friends make life worth living - they help us love more and see life from a different angle.

 

 

In fact, good friends are a lot like good books.

 

They encourage us.

 

 

They help us see the world a little differently.

 

 

They can make us feel bold and brave.

 

 

They can make us laugh or cry.

 

 

They can make us wonder.

 

They remind us that we are not alone in this world.

 

Margaret Drabble maintained that we were put on this earth to "endeavor in the face of the impossible."  Good friends help us do just that - endeavor!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Love and Friendship 3

"The best way to know God is to love many things."

Vincent Van Gogh

 

 

 

 

I love pondering the infinite aspect of love and creativity.  It is easy for children to understand when I tell them that my grandmother had nine children, and my mother had three children, but my grandmother did not love her nine children any less than my mother loved her three children.  It is a bit like the magic well in the fairy tales.  As long as you keep dipping your ladle into the well, it will never run dry.  So too with our hearts, as long as we choose to keep loving, then our magic wells - our hearts - will never run dry!  And as long as we keep creating, we will never run out of things to create.

 

A LOVELY writing and life exercise for children and adults - at end of every day:

 

Write down three things that you LOVED about your day.

 

You should really never run out of things to write about!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Love and Friendship 2

Love inspires

 

 

 

 

 

 

My second book, Inventor McGregor, is all about a jolly fellow by the name of Hector McGregor who discovers that the source of inspiration lies in the heart of his happy, happy home - surrounded by his cheery wife, five children and a hen called Hattie.  In other words LOVE inspires him, as it does all of us, I believe.

 

 

Inspire is a Latin word - INSPIRARE - and it means to breath life into.  Isn't that a powerful definition?

 

 

So while it is love that inspires us all, it will be a different love for different people.  But whether it is science, baseball, dinosaurs, Mozart, hiking, swimming, baking, painting, or writing, these loves make us want to live more, they put us in touch with our better selves and help us make the world a better place. 

 

“Love the earth and sun and animals.  Despise riches.  Give alms to anyone who asks.  Stand up for the stupid and the crazy.  Devote your income and labor to others......and your very flesh shall be a great poem”  Whitman

 

                                                                                  

 

 

A good question to end each day -

 

"What breathed life into me?"



Love and Friendship 1

"All I want to say in books, all I ever wanted to say in books, is I LOVE THE WORLD" E.B. White

                                                                                                                    
When I talk to children about LOVE, I tell them I do not mean the sappy soppy Hollywood version. Rather I mean something else-another kind of love that has to do with what you are ready to give up for another person.


 Writers for children usually write from some love they feel for the world around them.  And when we love something, we automatically want to share it with others.




During my school visits, I will explain to children that I did not grow up in a very demonstrative culture.  For the most part, Scottish people do not indulge in public displays of affection as they might do here in the States - we are after all a nation of introverts!




A story about LOVE that I share with children:

Although my parents were not in the habit of saying, "We love you," to their children, I still knew that I was loved, because of what my parents did.  I give this example of my father and I.  One day we were at the local library where I was foraging for my books of fairy tales - always a favorite of mine.  Back in those days, children were given two library tickets that allowed them to check out two books for a two week period.  Adults were given four tickets.  But on this particular day, I was desperately yearning for more books: I knew that I would rapidly devour these two books long before I could make another trip to the library.  My dad, seeing my crest-fallen face, put aside two of his books, and gave me his two tickets.

So, as I walked out of that library with four books under my arms instead of two, there wasn't a shred of doubt in my little book lover's heart that I was loved, because what greater love could there be, I reasoned, than to give up your library books for another?

Wisdom 4

Good Stories and Wise People have much in Common



Good stories and wise people foster a state of wonder



Wislawa Szymborska, the Pulitzer prize winning poet from Poland, said in her acceptance speech, "Poets, if they are genuine, must keep repeating, I don't know.....each poem marks an effort to answer this statement." (and I would say the same can be said of children's stories and children's authors)  Each story, in some way, is an attempt to wrestle with what we do not know, with what we wonder about.  As Katherine Paterson, Newberry medalist, says, "Story is the way we make sense of life."


Of course, WONDER is rather counter-cultural in our age of Google and Wikipedia.  But good stories and wise people encourage us to bask in mystery, to see, in the words of Browning, that "all of earth is crammed with Heaven," and to know that the best things in life are meant not to be measured, but treasured.


Nor is it the kind of wonder that marvels at the extraordinary or unusual, but rather the kind of wonder that Dr. Dorian refers to in Charlotte's Web....

When Mrs. Arable asks him if he understands how there can be writing in the spider's web, he answers,

" Oh no, I don't understand it.  But for that matter I don't understand how a spider learned to spin a web in the first place.  When the words appeared everyone said they were a miracle.  But nobody pointed out that the web itself is a miracle."

Some of my favorite words of wisdom to ponder this week

"Literature is prismatic. Light shines through the excellent books or dances off and the rainbow it gives shine on and on in a child's life in a thousand different ways."  Jane Yolen


"To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart." Unknown







"Show me a day when the world wasn't new"