Ken Burns on Learning from History and How History Shapes Us

Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns recently gave a commencement speech at Stanford. It has been making its way around the web. There are many good things in the speech, but a couple of sections really stood out to me. As a fellow student and teacher of history,  I wanted to post them here so I could come back to them from time to time.

First, on the importance on learning from history:

Over those decades of historical documentary filmmaking, I have also come to the realization that history is not a fixed thing, a collection of precise dates, facts and events that add up to a quantifiable, certain, confidently known truth. History is a mysterious and malleable thing, constantly changing, not just as new information emerges, but as our own interests, emotions and inclinations change. Each generation rediscovers and reexamines that part of its past that gives its present new meaning, new possibility and new power. The question becomes for us now – for you especially – what will we choose as our inspiration? Which distant events and long dead figures will provide us with the greatest help, the most coherent context and the wisdom to go forward?

This is in part an existential question. None of us gets out of here alive...The hard times and vicissitudes of life will ultimately visit everyone. You will also come to realize that you are less defined by the good things that happen to you, your moments of happiness and apparent control, than you are by those misfortunes and unexpected challenges that, in fact, shape you more definitively, and help to solidify your true character – the measure of any human value. You, especially, know that the conversation that comes out of tragedy and injustice needs to be encouraged, emphasis on courage. It is through those conversations that we make progress.

And on the importance of stories...and moments...that shape us:

I have a searing memory of the summer of 1962, when I was almost 9, joining our family dinner on a hot, sweltering day in a tract house in a development in Newark, Delaware, and seeing my mother crying. She had just learned, and my brother and I had just been told, that she would be dead of cancer within six months. But that’s not what was causing her tears. Our inadequate health insurance had practically bankrupted us, and our neighbors – equally struggling working people – had taken up a collection and presented my parents with six crisp $20 bills – $120 in total – enough to keep us solvent for more than a month. In that moment, I understood something about community and courage, about constant struggle and little victories. That hot June evening was a victory. And I have spent my entire professional life trying to resurrect small moments within the larger sweep of American history, trying to find our better angels in the most difficult of circumstances, trying to wake the dead, to hear their stories.

But how do we keep that realization of our own inevitable mortality from paralyzing us with fear? And how do we also keep our usual denial of this fact from depriving our lives and our actions of real meaning, of real purpose? This is our great human challenge, your challenge. This is where history can help. The past often offers an illuminating and clear-headed perspective from which to observe and reconcile the passions of the present moment, just when they threaten to overwhelm us. The history we know, the stories we tell ourselves, relieve that existential anxiety, allow us to live beyond our fleeting lifespans, and permit us to value and love and distinguish what is important. And the practice of history, both personal and professional, becomes a kind of conscience for us.

Good words to ponder.

Re-Watching Downton Abbey (Series One)

I've begun to turn the corner in terms of energy and appetite, but I'm still very limited in terms of what I can do each day. I get around better on my leg than I used to, but I'm struggling with neuropathy (numbness in my feet and a little in my hands) as a result of the chemo, which is also slowing me down. In between trying to do what I can do each day, I still need to rest a lot. Enter good books, my sketch pad, and yes...library copies of the first seasons of Downton Abbey.

We finally finished watching the final series (number six) a couple of weeks ago, and I found myself feeling really sad that the show was over. I also found myself trying to remember what the Abbey was like at the beginning of the show, which originally starts in 1912 (it ends on New Years 1926). Those fourteen years covered by six seasons cover a lot of change in the characters' lives.

Last week I wound my way through series one, which covers 1912 (it begins with the sinking of the Titanic and the drowning of the would-be heirs to the estate, propelling the plot forward) through 1914 (the declaration of what would become the Great War or World War I). Here are a few things that struck me as I watched the show with 20/20 hindsight (or as my husband chuckled, with "2016 hindsight"). I'm making comments here based on the entire show, so if you've not watched the whole thing, beware of spoilers.

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The music and the house itself are magical from the very beginning. The house is clearly set up as the "main character" from the get go, and everything swirls around the estate -- how people feel about it (upstairs and down), how the family is trying to hold onto it in the midst of change, how they navigate its rooms or make the whole place run. And the music is just wonderful. I've put a collection of Downton Abbey tunes on hold and am looking forward to listening to the evocative melodies minus the narrative to see how it holds up.

Bates and Anna become fast friends from the beginning too. After everything we end up watching those two go through -- their tumultuous courtship and their angst-ridden soap-opera riddled marriage -- it was refreshing to see them as friends before all that. They quickly become allies in the house against the scheming O'Brien and Thomas and it's a delight to see the reserved Bates start to unbend and smile as he chats in the kitchen or the hallways with sweet Anna. I'm not sure I really like where they took Bates' character in subsequent seasons -- they always seem to cast doubts on whether or not he was really guilty of heinous crimes -- but watching series 1 made me remember how much I originally liked him, and helped me remember why Anna fell in love with him in the first place. They do a good job of establishing Bates' deep sense of honor and loyalty (which can sometimes make him rigid and get him in trouble). They also do a terrific job of establishing those same things in Anna which somehow aren't as rigid. I also love seeing her friendship with Lady Mary and how strong it is from the beginning as well. Mary will let down her hair (literally!) with Anna when she won't with anyone else.

The Dowager and Isobel Crawley are at daggers from the beginning too, and it just makes me laugh in delight because we know how many more years of those wonderful zingers are still to come...and yet how much of a friendship will ultimately be built between the two of them as well.

I still love Matthew Crawley and mourn the knowledge that he will only survive half of the show. It's almost impossible not to love him from the very beginning, when he toddles around the village on his bicycle, exuding sweetness and putting his foot in it with Lady Mary and scandalizing the Dowager with his middle class roots and his talk of work and weekends. We begin to see his essential kindness in the way he treats Mr. Moesley even when he feels that the work Moesley does is superfluous and pointless. You begin to realize that in some ways, learning to get used to Matthew is like a trial run for the Crawleys who are going to have to face much harder things in sons-in-laws down the pike (like the Irish nationalist chauffeur).

Lady Sybil! She's alive! I'd forgotten how much I loved Sybil and why I mourned her passing with actual tears. It's so much fun to see her in the early shows, shaking everyone up with her sprightly youth and her modern ideas. She is such necessary ballast for the family, especially for Mary and Edith.

And speaking of Edith, I had completely forgotten how utterly unlikeable she was in series one, at least a lot of the time. Kudos to the actress who does an amazing job of taking the character through one of the best character arcs in the show. Edith really matures over the years, deepening in ways we can respect and admire. It's almost impossible to reconcile the elegant, assured, and caring woman we know at the end with the insecure, pinched-face, mean-spirited young woman she is at the beginning. The best we can do is to feel sorry for her because the ultimate insecurities of the younger daughter come through from the start. But it's hard to feel too sorry for her when she's manipulating events and trying to wreck everything for her sister. I know Mary's not terribly likeable at the start either, but there feels like more depth to Mary from the beginning, even though she goes out of her way to hide it. I kept wanting to say "oh, grow up!" to Edith in exasperation, but it feels good to know that she will do exactly that.

I had forgotten how much Mrs. Patmore yells in the first series, especially at poor Daisy. Knowing how close they will grow over the years, it's a little startling to see her treating Daisy like the mere servant she is...and oy, how hard Daisy works.

Then again, they all work hard....and there are so many of them in series one. I'd forgotten just how big the downstairs staff was before the war. No wonder Mr. Carson spends the rest of the show lamenting the glory years when they had a full working staff, not the skeleton crew they end up with. The pre-war years show Downton in its full almost still 19th century glory. Maids and footmen seem to be everywhere, all of them in much more formal attire than I recalled.

Mr. Carson is such a loveable curmudgeon from the start. His devotion to Downton and to Lady Mary becomes an essentially understandable part of who he is from the very beginning. Downton is his family in ways that none of the other servants ever quite feel. I was also surprised to realize how close he and Mrs. Hughes are, despite their differences, from the very beginning....I was thinking that developed more over time. We get small glimpses into each of their pasts (Carson's time on a vaudeville stage, Mrs. Hughes' early opportunity to marry a farmer) which makes them richer characters we want to know more about. I find it interesting that the only person that Mrs. Hughes tells about the farmer's second proposal (when he comes back into her life in the episode where the fair comes to the village) is Carson. I don't know if it was my imagination or not, but Carson seemed awfully relieved that Mrs. Hughes was staying...and I don't know if that was just because he prized her skills as a housekeeper.

Daisy is another character who goes through great changes; she is lovably daft in series 1. She retains some of that daftness the whole way through, but she also grows up a lot. I had forgotten her hapless crush on Tom and her cluelessness about William's crush on her. William is just a sweetie. It's a bit hard to enjoy his presence in this first series knowing what's ahead for him in the war. 

I barely recognized Tom Branson. Golly gumdrops, as Lord Grantham might say, the early Tom and the later Tom are continents apart. I remembered, of course, that Tom was an Irish nationalist and a socialist, and that he was part of Lady Sybil's political awakening ("votes for women!") but it's a bit startling to see just how much fervor young Tom has for revolutionary politics and how much disdain he has for the English aristocracy when he essentially becomes a card carrying member of that aristocracy later in the show. I get that he comes to love the family, and that he wants them to know young Sybil (especially after her mother dies) but does it seem totally realistic that he would step so easily into the world he derided for so long? I like both manifestations of Tom (and I was especially glad he was still around to help the family after the writers killed off Matthew) but I'm just not sure that I believe in the ease of his transition from one kind of life to another.

Who remembers the back story of Cora and the Earl of Grantham? I certainly did not recall that he married Cora solely for her money (they seem to have no trouble admitting that, either of them, when Robert is bemoaning the awful fortune hunting Duke that snubs Mary) and only fell in love with her later, in their first year of marriage. Some prequel fan fiction just seems to be begging to be written here. Can you imagine the Dowager Countess' indignation over her son the Earl chasing a vulgar American in order to save the estate? Even though she would understand the practical need. No wonder she and Cora are still a little prickly with each other, even twenty years or so on.

O'Brien is just wicked this first season, though she becomes a little more sympathetic in season two (more on that season later...I've only just started watching it again). I had forgotten what a terrible influence she was on Thomas, who has moments when you wish you could like him. He is so easy to manipulate, maybe because he's hungry for friendship and respect. It's amazing the way Thomas keeps managing to keep his job at Downton, despite all of his scheming.

Gwen was an interesting character in series one, but I can see why they moved her on quickly. In many ways, she stood most symbolically for the changes that were happening in the world....for women, for the servant class. She also plays an important part in showing Lady Sybil's kindness and her openness to not just embrace change, but to be part of its unfolding. I am glad that they decided to bring Gwen back for a scene or two in the final series, as it just felt like a "full circle" sort of ending to her story. It also helped us to remember why we loved Sybil's character so much.

What Makes a Hero a Hero?

My 12 year old has been in major Star Wars mode this month, which means we recently watched the original trilogy in all of its original theatrical release glory. (Tonight we get the special release of the first film, complete with all its extras…longer Death Star run! Greedo shot first! Slithery CGI Jabba! It will be her first time to see Episode IV with all of Lucas’ changes.)

Watching these films has gotten us thinking about heroes and villains. Her fascination with Luke and Darth got me pondering, and I decided to pop over to the American Film Institute’s Hero and Villains list to see where they showed up. AFI, in case you don’t know, presents a list of the top 50 American film heroes and villains (along with lists of many other things connected to American film).

Here’s the interesting thing: Darth Vader shows up at #3 on the all-time villain list. And Luke Skywalker…doesn’t make the cut.

I was not surprised to see Han Solo come in at #14 on the hero list – we love scoundrels-turned-heroes. But Obi-Wan Kenobi at #37? Really? I mean, I love Alec Guinness and the gravitas he brings to the role, which ups the whole tone of the first film especially. I’m not sure anyone else could have brought the weight needed to lines like “You must learn the ways of the Force…”

And yes, of course he sacrifices himself in battle, another mark of heroism. But his role in really more of mentor-to-hero than hero; it’s his exit from the land of the living (though he continues to show up in ghostly form in the next movies) that allows Luke the room he needs to grow and come to grips with his destiny.

Luke is the one who has the classic hero journey. He not only ends up besting the #3 movie villain of all time in battle, but that villain is his father, and his continued reaching out in love and forgiveness to that villainous wreck of a father is what eventually enables Darth to do the right thing and find redemption. And he blew up the Death Star! How much more heroic can Luke be?

Of course, he doesn’t get the girl (primarily since the only girl for miles around in this galaxy turns out to be his twin sister, hidden from their dastardly father at birth) and one wonders if that factors in. Of course, it’s also a teensy bit frustrating to consider that Leia herself does not make it to the hero list (there are women on the list) since she seems to be at least as heroic as Han, both of them in supporting role kind of ways.

So what do you think? Should Luke have made the list?

In case you’re curious, here’s how AFI defines hero:

“For voting purposes, a "hero" was defined as a character(s) who prevails in extreme circumstances and dramatizes a sense of morality, courage and purpose. Though they may be ambiguous or flawed, they often sacrifice themselves to show humanity at its best.”

The Gospel According to Frozen

Our family came late to the Frozen phenomenon. We didn't see the film until it came out on DVD, and though we all loved it, and the sweet girl has come to love it even more after several viewings, our singing of those darn catchy songs came six months after most people got stuck on them. We've laughed over several parody songs and videos (my favorite may be "Do You Wanna Go to Starbucks?") and enjoyed singing the actual songs around the house thanks to a library-borrowed copy of the soundtrack. Oh, and fallen firmly in love with Olaf, of course.

S. ended up watching it again the other day, and I sat down to enjoy it with her as I'd promised. It was the first time in a while that I'd watched the whole movie instead of just snatches, and I found myself impressed again by the lovely visuals, the smart storytelling, and that great narrative choice at the end that shows the power of sacrificial love and pays tribute to the wonderful bond of sisterhood. (Just in case you're one of a handful of people who has not yet succumbed to seeing the film, I'll try to keep that vague.)

A couple of other things really impressed me this time through, however, and I found myself thinking "that'll preach" at least twice. Once comes in the reprise of "For the First Time and Forever" when Anna is in the ice palace talking to Elsa, trying to convince her that together, they can fix the terrible winter that Elsa accidentally set loose when she lost her temper and gave into fear.

Anna's sweet earnestness is so palpable here: she is just so relieved that she finally gets why her sister has been hiding for so long, and is sure that the two of them, standing firmly together, can find a way to make things right. She also has a touching belief that her sister is capable of undoing the damage she's done -- she's sure that Elsa will not only want to do the right thing, but that she'll be able to find a way to undo it. It hasn't fully dawned on her that Elsa not only doesn't know the extent of the damage she's inadvertently inflicted, but has no clue how to reverse it...and is more terrified than ever of anyone, especially her beloved sister, getting close to her in case she accidentally hurts her again. It's a powerful musical reprise, with the two of them singing together but once again showing in their words how far apart they are. Anna sings her sweet assurance, while Elsa sings her despair, ending on the crushing clashing words "I CAN'T!"

It's those words that give me shivers every time; they come from such a deep place of fear, and accompany Elsa's unintentional unleashing, yet again, of crushing hurt. And yet there's freedom in the words too, when you think about it. In emotional and spiritual terms, this is where Elsa pretty much hits rock bottom -- she's completely at the end of herself, and there's nowhere to go here but up. Yes, things get crazier later on, mostly when she's threatened by the usurpers who see her struggles as their opportunity to cash in and make a power grab, but there's something almost more freeing in this "I can't" moment than in anything in the "Let it Go" song, when Elsa is re-learning the joy of the creative powers of her gifts, but reaching the firm conclusion that the only way to be free is to shut herself off from everyone else in case she loses control again.

The other bit I never noticed came ever earlier, when Elsa first accidentally hurts Anna when they're children. She is devastated that their joyful playtime turned frightening and that her attempts to save Anna from injury actually ended in hurting her. When her parents take Anna to the trolls for healing, the head troll makes the comment that he can help her because it's only her head that's received the freezing jolt, not her heart. Cold minds and thoughts, as it turns out, are not good, but they're somehow still on the surface, far easier to heal than frozen hearts. I love this insight: that it's the heart that matters the most. At the root, it a heart problem that needs help and healing we cannot provide for ourselves, and only true love (sacrificial, deep, real true love) can ever fix a damaged heart.

Yup. That'll preach.

The Lostness of Mad Men

We’ve recently been watching the second season of Mad Men. I find myself fascinated by the writing and acting (and yes, costumes and sets) of this show, while not necessarily always enjoying the stories. It’s probably a mark of how well written and acted it is that I care about the characters as much as I do, even while gritting my teeth over many of their actions and choices. For instance, I honestly can’t understand how I remain sympathetic to Don Draper, whose sometimes despicable choices make me wince (or make me want to smack him) and yet for the most part, my main feeling for him is pity.

It’s the loneliness of the characters that keeps stabbing me to the heart. The way they strive after success, prestige, youth, beauty, or what have you is sometimes funny, sometimes awful, sometimes pitiable, but you realize how many of them are just truly lonely. It’s particularly painful to watch the scenes between the married couples, like Don and Betty and Pete and Trudy, who seem to spin along like isolated tops, never orbiting close enough to one another (even when they’re touching) to make a real connection.

A scene that took my breath in almost painful intensity the other evening came in an episode when Betty had been yelling a lot at Bobby, the youngest Draper child. It became clear midway through that her frustration with Bobby was really misplaced frustration at her unfaithful and distant husband. She kept snapping at Don, telling him he should discipline Bobby for various minor infractions, and finally Don snapped and threw one of Bobby’s toys against the wall (a toy the child had been playing with at the table) and stormed out.

The boy, about five years old, came trailing forlornly after his angry and frustrated father and lisped out a quiet “I’m sorry.” Don’s angry face looked like it was about to melt. Quite frankly, melting would be a good thing for Don, but he always seems to master whatever emotion threatens to engulf him without surrendering to it. You could practically see him take a deep, inward breath and pull himself together. “Sometimes dads get mad,” he said, kindly and calmly and inadequately, but at least it was an admission of sorts that he’d lost his cool. “Did your dad get mad?” asked Bobby curiously, and Don nodded and told him lots of times. “And your daddy’s dead?” asked Bobby then, and Don responded, “He died a long time ago.” To which the child replied, his face completely somber, “We need to find you a new daddy.”

This heart wrenching scene actually ends in Don hugging his son close, a tenderness we don’t often get to see. Talk about a beautifully played and written one. That one childish remark cuts to the heart of Don’s lostness, and the lostness of all the other characters too. 

Everybody needs a loving father. We may especially feel it when we’ve lost our earthly fathers or are estranged from them, but it’s just an underlying truth for us all, regardless of what we've experienced with our human parents. Yet another reason to be deeply thankful for the loving Abba heart of God.

Storyteller's Workshop: William Shakespeare's Star Wars

Lately I’ve been enjoying a word I don’t often use or ponder: pastiche.

Isn’t that a great word? Try it out a time or two and let it roll around your tongue. It looks like it might be pistachio flavored, but in reality it’s rather pasty. According to the Oxford Dictionary, it comes to us from French and Italian, based on the late Latin pasta, meaning (no, not spaghetti) 'paste'.

This makes sense, because a pastiche is essentially a pasting together of styles. It is (to quote the dictionary again) “an artistic work in a style that imitates that of another work, artist, or period” or “an artistic work consisting of a medley of pieces taken from various sources.” I like the notion of “a medley of pieces” – somehow when that combines with the notion of “paste,” I come up with a visual image of a mosaic.

The pastiche that has me thinking about all of this is William Shakespeare’s Star Wars: Verily, a New Hope. This delightful book by Ian Doescher is a 169 page iambic pentameter riff on the original 1977 Star Wars film. Think of it as the Bard of Avon with a light saber in his hand, a rumble between imperial forces and William Shakespeare and George Lucas (“Great, kid! Don’t get cocky!”), or a mosaic picture of Darth Vader made up of thousands of tiny words. Words that make up 3,076 lines, to be precise. The author counted them, and assures us in his afterword that this is about the average length of a Shakespearean play. 

When I stumbled onto this book on our library’s new book shelves, just the thought of it made me smile. Star Wars and Shakespeare seemed like a potentially happy marriage, and in Doescher’s hands it really becomes one.  His love of and familiarity with both worlds makes the dance a smooth delight, as though Luke, Leia, Han and our other beloved Star Wars characters have just been standing in the wings of the Globe theater, awaiting their cue.

It’s a wonderful read, from C-3PO’s opening line: “Now is the summer of our happiness/Made winter by this sudden, fierce attack!” to the ominous prequel-setting ending: “There let our heroes rest free from attack,/Till darkness rise and Empire striketh back.” I think what made me happiest, as I sped through it, was the delightful way the old/new form brought freshness to content I’ve known by heart for years.

The Shakespearean cadences lend extra nobility to the already noble Rebel cause. Luke’s turning to the Rebel cause, in the wake of his Aunt and Uncle’s deaths, feels truly poignant. Han’s self-preserving, scoundrel self is particularly wonderful in Shakespearean mode. When Han appears to take the money and run, in the scene prior to the Alliance’s final attack run on the death star, I love Luke’s bitter play on words “Then take thou care now, Han, thou Solo act,/For certain ‘tis the part thou best dost play” which leads into an introspective soliloquy from Han (after Luke exits). “Without the inner compass of my soul,/How can I vainly hope to pilot life?” he asks, and adds “A smuggler’s heart doth keep calm time inside,/No matter sways a pirate’s peaceful pulse./But something stirs in me I ne’er have felt:/Is this a rebel’s heart I feel within?”

Obi-Wan gets the smallest makeover, but I think that’s probably because Alec Guinness delivered all his lines with Shakespearean gravitas to begin with. Darth Vader seems darker and more tragic. R2, whose beeps fall into iambic rhythm, gets asides (in English!) that help us understand his feisty droid soul. Leia gets a “sing hey and lack-a-day” lament song for Alderaan. In short, this is a brilliant bit of pastiche.

Creative Prompts and Exercises

• Time for you own pastiching. (And yes, the Oxford dictionary says it can be used as a verb!) Try choosing content you know well – a story or a scene from a story – but writing it in a completely different form than the original. Borrow a well-known form or voice to do it. Here are some possibilities:

Borrow the Bard’s favorite poetic cadence, iambic pentameter (an iamb is an unstressed/stressed syllable pattern; just put five together for pentameter) to write a speech from the perspective of a favorite character. This could be a re-write of an already existing speech or a quiet soliloquy spoken at a time when the character doesn’t originally speak in the story (but you have a feeling you know what’s going on in their heart and mind).

Borrow Dr. Seuss’ simple sing-song cadence and love of nonsensical words and re-write a favorite scene from a novel, short story, or fairy-tale.

Borrow a classical fairy-tale form (read Grimm, Perrault, Andersen stories for inspiration) and re-tell a non fairy-tale, perhaps a contemporary, modern story, in that mode.

Choose any writer whose style you find distinctive and enjoyable to emulate and give this exercise a whirl. Hemingway’s short, jabbing sentences; Tolkien’s meandering yet purposeful world-building prose; Bronte’s gothic or weather-drenched atmosphere making; Lewis’ kind-uncle story-telling narrator voice in Narnia – choose one of these or another writing voice you know and love well, and try telling a completely different story through it. Feel free to borrow liberally from your source materials – familiar words, phrases, story moments, plot devices. They won’t mind. (At one point, Doescher has Luke hold up a stormtrooper’s helmet and exclaim “Alas, poor stormtrooper, I knew ye not,/Yet have I ta’en both uniform and life/From thee…”)

Doescher paired Star Wars and Shakespeare because, despite their vast differences, he saw similarities in them (especially in the way Star Wars utilized “archetypal characters and relationships”). You may want to make a similar choice – maybe a modern character you love has always seemed ready to walk into the pages of a Dickens novel – or you may want to try unusual pairings that don’t seem to have anything in common at first glance. Who knows? You might discover connections between them or new nuances in character. At the very least, you’ll have fun!

Storyteller's Workshop: The Princess Bride

Our Netflix disc arrived damaged a couple of weeks ago, leaving us with a Saturday evening planned movie night and no movie. Too tired to get creative, we turned to our tried and true stash of films and decided to watch The Princess Bride.

Like many people, we’ve watched this 1987 film directed by Rob Reiner so many times that we can quote much of it by heart. If you’re a fan…well, go ahead…take a moment here to relive some of your favorite lines with relish. “Have fun storming the castle!” is one of my staples, though there are many others that pop up in our conversations (sometimes in ways that make sense and sometimes just randomly…)

Although we’ve watched it many times, it had been a while since we’d seen it, and I found myself watching it with more freshness than usual. In particular, I found myself intrigued to realize just how low-budget this endearing and enduring film looks, and how much the lack of “wow effects” of any sort doesn’t hurt its grand storytelling one bit. William Goldman, who wrote the screenplay based on his own novel of the same name, does a terrific job of getting to and sticking with the heart of the story. Yes, it’s brilliantly casted and acted with incredible panache and humor, but if the characters and plot hadn’t been drawn so well, I don’t think it would have become such a beloved classic.

Here are a few takeaways from The Princess Bride for us as storytellers.

1)      A great framing device goes a long way.

Think about how different this film would be if it had just been a straightforward narrative. If we had started with Buttercup and her Farm Boy, we would have entered right away into a fairy-tale world. Instead we start in the “here and now” of 1987, in a small boy’s room when the boy is home from school sick. His grandfather arrives to read him a story, one his father used to read to him and one he also read to the boy’s father when he was little. We can tell this story is golden gem for the grandfather, but the boy at first is resistant. We enter the story via his youthful skepticism and enjoy the chuckles that come from his initial resistance to the romantic elements in the tale. (The grandfather has promised him adventure, so why is there all this kissing?)

The film doesn’t just use this storytelling device at the beginning and end. Periodically, throughout the tale, we’re interrupted by the boy’s questions or exclamations. The action essentially freezes (or sometimes jumps ahead…a very useful transition tool!) while the grandfather responds to the boy’s reactions. So we’re never allowed to forget for a moment that we’re traversing the realm of story. We traverse it with the storyteller and story listener, falling as deeply and magically into the story as they do. I think this is as close as a movie has ever come to replicating the magic of falling into a book.

2)      It can be important to know what your characters want.

This is one of the first rules of good storytelling, and one that teachers tell their writing students over and over. I can still hear variations of it in the voice of one of my literature professors in college! But we really see it in action here. Buttercup and Westley want nothing more than to be together (and believe that nothing can stop true love!) but there are plenty of obstacles, often caused by things that the antagonists want, like starting a war with Guilder.

My favorite instance of knowing just what a character wants, however, comes via Inigo Montoya. Inigo never lets us forget his quest: a six-fingered man killed his father when he was eleven, and he has spent his life training as a swordsman so that when he eventually catches up with this villain, he will be able to defeat him. After first declaring, of course: “Hello! My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” With a set-up like that, we know we’re bound to see a six-fingered man before long, bound to get the scene where the two of them finally fight, and bound to hear Inigo utter that line he’s spent his life rehearsing. Our anticipation builds because of the set-up. And the pay-off, when we finally get it, is terrific.

3)      Sometimes it’s smart to play against type.

Sometimes a character seems utterly predictable because of what he or she looks like or appears to represent. On second glance, we learn that there is much more to the character than meets the eye – and that, in fact, a part of his or her personality seems to be directly opposite of our expectations. The supporting character Fezzik is a perfect example here. An enormous giant, he’s originally hired by Vizzini (actually working for Prince Humperdinck) to help kidnap the princess. He’s clearly valued by Vizzini for his giant size and brute strength, and we initially expect him to be thuggish.

It turns out that Fezzik is gentle and kind. He hates hurting anyone and doesn’t think it’s “sportsman-like” to take unfair advantage in a fight. He also has a love for rhyming games, a game we see Inigo, his good friend, encourage him in (one of the many reasons we come to love Inigo). All of these elements make Fezzik endearing, but especially so because they seem to play against our initial impression and the expectations of other characters.

Creative Prompts and Exercises

·        Take a story you know well, either one you’ve written or an old tale you could easily re-tell, and create a framing device for it. Is the story being shared with a child? Could the story be an important memory passed on from one generation to the next? Is someone telling the story at an important occasion (a wedding, a funeral, a reunion) a setting that will have more meaning for us at the end when we understand its significance more fully because of the story?

·        Create a story with at least three characters who know exactly what they want. Make one character on a quest of some sort. Make one character want something that will potentially block the first character from getting what he or she wants. Create another character whose goal is to help the first character achieve their goal (thinking through carefully why it’s so important for that character to help the first one).

·        Create a character profile for a “stock” character who looks predictable. This could be a hero, jock, beautiful princess, giant, bookish poet, or frail and elderly woman. The idea is to give the character certain traits that we expect that kind of person to have. Make them look predictable, and then have them do, say, or be a certain way that plays completely against that stock type.

·        Just for fun…if you’re a fan of The Princess Bride, try writing a “missing scene.” What was going through Westley’s head on the day the Dread Pirate Roberts first threatened to kill him? How did Humperdinck choose Buttercup to wed? What was life like for Inigo the day after he saw his father die? How did Vizzini meet up with Fezzik and Inigo? The possibilities are endless. Remember, it’s okay to play in someone else’s fictional universe, and it can give you good practice in writing dialogue and actions for characters whose quirks and motivations you already understand.

Another New Feature: Storyteller's Workshop

Last week I launched a new feature here on the blog. Marmee's Library will be my semi-regular reviews of children's literature, tailored to be especially helpful for teachers and parents.

This coming week I'm launching another new feature. I'll be calling these posts Storyteller's Workshop. Each post will celebrate good storytelling, and will feature a discussion of a story (book, film, or otherwise). We'll look at some elements in the story that help make it come alive for readers or viewers. I love talking about what makes a story work well! In addition to reflections, each post will include creative prompts or exercises which I hope will be helpful for writers of all ages.

Stay tuned for the first Storyteller's Workshop post tomorrow! 

"I Always Think There's a Band, Kid": Gospel Echoes in "The Music Man"

It’s been a Music Man week in our family.

I don’t know if your family has “go-to” movies that are the equivalent of comfort food, but our family definitely does. If The Sound of Music is our mashed potatoes movie, then The Music Man is probably our homemade mac and cheese. I got my daughter hooked on this film early (she once watched the “Marian the Librarian” scene five times in a row) though it’s only been recently that she’s been ready to sit through the whole thing. My husband and I have enjoyed watching it numerous times over the years – I think he once helped design a set for a stage production of it.

I confess I also love the movie for Marian's hat.

I fell in love with this movie in my early teen years. There was a year where I probably watched it once a month. I love its bright colors, the fact that it’s set in “my” historical era (the early 20^th century), the costumes, the creative music, the humor, the great performances. Of course I had a crush on Robert Preston, which probably goes without saying.  And it always made me smile to see little “Ronny” Howard hoofing it to “Gary, Indiana” years before he’d grow up to direct things like Parenthood and Apollo 13.

Watching it again this week – in two sittings, because it’s so long – I found myself musing again why I love this story so much. Yes, it’s funny and snarky – its caricatures of human nature draw big pictures we can all relate to on some level. The plot, like most musical plots, doesn’t hold up under intense scrutiny. And yet, there are moments in this movie that actually make me tear up, even though they come in the midst of so much delightful silliness, and even though I’ve seen them twenty-seven times. That’s the power of story for you.

All the moments, I realized, involved Harold Hill. I got to thinking about Harold Hill and why he makes such a terrific “every-man.” Despite his incredible charm, he’s really a scoundrel. OK, yes, a Han Solo kind of scoundrel, but a scoundrel nonetheless. He’s a con man, one with years of practice at hoodwinking innocent people into buying stuff they don’t need and will never really use by whipping them up into a frenzy over how important that stuff is to their health and well-being. (In other words, he’s in advertising.) He also has an eye for any side benefits he can get out of his latest con, including making time with the pretty ladies – especially the town music teachers who might figure out his con and rat on him to the authorities unless he keeps them off-kilter emotionally.

Despite his brimming confidence, a confidence that Preston plays brilliantly right down to the way he walks and gestures, you get glimpses of the fact that Harold Hill is insecure. He never stays long enough in one place to get caught – or to get close to anybody. He hides behind the mask of “music professor” – something we learn he actually isn’t – and even behind his name. His friend Marcellus, who used to run cons with him before turning legitimate and getting a job, knows him by the name of Gregory. We never find out if that, in fact, is his real name, or was just another false name he wore in some other towns he conned long ago.

Nobody in town has a clue who Harold Hill really is, perhaps most especially Harold Hill himself.

The beauty of the story comes when one person sees through all the masks he’s hiding behind to the real person underneath. Marian Paroo, herself no stranger to hiding and insecurity (just in other ways) realizes that Harold Hill is behaving shamefully. She sees that he’s a liar and a fraud pretending to be someone he’s not. She invests time in uncovering those lies, only to find that when she gets to the end of them that she doesn’t actually want to shame him in front of the town. That’s because she’s come to appreciate the gifts that Harold has, unbeknownst to himself, actually brought to them – his imagination, energy, his passion for living, his ability to make people care about something beyond their insulated little lives. She begins to see Harold not as he is, but who he might become, and she loves him, even while he’s still a mess. That’s grace.

It’s also why I tend to tear up in three places: the first when Harold, alone for a few moments (as he hardly ever is) imagines himself conducting a band just as he claims he can. We see the magic that thought brings him, and the sadness he feels when the dream disappears and leaves him with the reality of who he actually is. I’m also moved every time I see the scene where Winthrop, Marian’s little brother, who has looked up to Harold as a hero, tearfully demands, “Are you a big fat liar?” and Harold, who for once has promised the truth, exclaims “Yes!” in a great moment of confession. That’s followed quickly by the most poignant line of the movie. After Winthrop says spitefully, “What band?” throwing Harold’s lie right back in his face, Harold says sorrowfully “I always think there’s a band, kid,” reminding us of that redeemed moment in his imagination and his longing to be the man he says he is.

And then of course, there’s the other great line, not long after, when Marian, having made her beautiful declaration of gratitude for everything he’s brought them, urges Harold to go before the angry townspeople descend on him to arrest him. Even Winthrop, dejected, urges him to go. And Harold says, in a completely wondering tone… “I can’t go, Winthrop…for the first time in my life, I got my foot caught in the door.”

What a great picture of how God’s grace catches us. We’re all little Harold Hills – conning ourselves and others, hiding behind masks, intentionally and even unintentionally causing others pain. Then someone unexpectedly shows us love – love that loves us in spite of the worst it sees in us – and when we try to run again, to escape through the door we’ve always left open as our emergency hatch when anybody gets too close, we stumble on the threshold. We slow down. We stop, even though we know that it’s not the easiest choice to stop. But we can’t help it. The pull of love is too strong, the pull of truth too beautiful. We don’t want to run anymore. The Hound of Heaven has caught us. And having loved us enough to pursue us and catch us, He’s going to love us into new creatures.

Who knew The Music Man was so full of gospel echoes?

Of Stories and Supermoons...

One of the other lovely moments of this past weekend was when our little three-person family hunkered down in the windows of the sweet girl's room after dark on Saturday night so we could watch the supermoon rising over the nearby hills. It was an awesome sight -- big, bright, tinging the very dark clouds in front of it silver, highlighting the outlines of trees.

The sweet girl was hugely excited. A supermoon, after all, is a somewhat novel occurrence (it's what you call a full moon that coincides with the closest approach the moon makes to earth in its elliptical orbit) and we hadn't caught the last one, fourteen months before. She came up with a story idea about Luna, the moon who once in a while becomes a superhero, and we've been working on it together during language arts time -- a treat for us both, since we officially finished the year's grammar text last week.

Which reminds me...any teacher/writer folks out there, do you have any story writing websites or curricula you especially love or recommend? Especially for late elementary/middle grade years? So far I have trusted to our love of reading good stories and just the actual act of writing stories -- S. writes them often, and sometimes we write them together -- to incorporate lots of natural learning. But as she rounds the corner on her tenth birthday and we contemplate (gulp!) fifth grade in the fall, I've found myself wanting to look into some resources.

But back to the supermoon. I wrote this little poem, full of sibilant sounds, in honor of the event:

The supermoon

ascends silently,

slides past cloudbank,

seams a silver lining,

then stands sentinel over

sighing sycamores…

and shines.

"You Know, Kind of Like Serenity..."

In the midst of this long, ongoing season of deep stress and exhaustion, I keep being amazed by the wonderfulness of God. What I love is when he provides those lovely, unexpected moments that make me laugh outright, or tear up with sudden beauty and gratitude, or just plain feel like hugging the world.

So often he sends those moments through my family.

One of the hardest pieces of the past very hard month has been lack of almost any time to write. This after the first couple months of the year when I felt like I'd dived back into some creative work with more zest and vitality than I'd felt in years. The novel I was writing -- yes, I just used the word novel -- was almost compelling me to the computer every late night and early morning, begging to be written even in tiny snatches. I loved every scrap of the time I got, even as I began to realize the writing time tunnel was narrowing to an almost close again. For the past few weeks, any writing time I can squeeze has been of the writing anything quickly for pay variety since I'm busy trying to fight wolfish creditors (where are Taran and the sword Dyrnwyn when you need them?) and to help keep food on the table.

Frankly, I miss my characters. I miss them so much it almost aches. But there's nothing I can do about it at the moment beyond keep missing them, and keep mulling their story in the late night snatches when I can't sleep.

This morning, the sweet girl was talking to me about one of her own stories. Yes, she's a story-teller and writer too, which I love. She was explaining something to me about one of her characters, who is eighteen, but not quite an adult, she explained earnestly, because in this world, you didn't really come of age until you were twenty. My tired brain thought that sounded familiar. And then she said, wonderfully casually, "You know, kind of like Serenity..."

Serenity is one of my characters. She is a princess, set to inherit a throne she is not quite ready for. Her wise mother is the acting regent; her beloved father has been missing for years. She's 19, on the cusp of 20, the age at which she will be considered old enough to become queen. She's trying to become ready for her royal responsibilities in the face of an imminent war. Circumstances have forced her to have to choose a suitor from the very people they most fear.

And she's real. Not just real to me. Real enough for my lovely nine year old, who has heard more of the actual written story than anyone else in the world, to mention her name so casually that it took me a few seconds to realize what she'd done. Real enough for my daughter to use her story as a frame of reference for her own creative story. Real enough that my daughter keeps encouraging me to write again because she wants to find out what happens to Serenity and to Winifred and Garron and to all of the peoples of Radmost and Charis.

I'm not sure there's a better gift someone can give a writer than to care about the story they're trying to tell, and to love their characters. What a great gift that was to me today.

Dressing Up Like a Princess

My eight year old woke up yesterday wanting to see pictures of the royal wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton. She especially wanted to know...did the bride have a train? (And how!) And so it goes, another day with imaginations captured by the world of princesses.

Yesterday my friend Don posted some musings about why even independent Americans are so highly fascinated with royal goings-on. Among other ideas, he posited one that I particularly like...human beings love to watch things like royal weddings because we deeply long for a king. In other words, at least some of our love of pageantry and fairy-tale stems from deep spiritual longing.

As a reader and writer of such tales, this is something I've suspected for a long time. It made me think again of George MacDonald's wonderful words at the beginning of The Princess and the Goblin:

THERE was once a little princess who—

"But Mr. Author, why do you always write about princesses?"

"Because every little girl is a princess."

"You will make them vain if you tell them that."

"Not if they understand what I mean."

"Then what do you mean?"

"What do you mean by a princess?"

"The daughter of a king."

"Very well, then every little girl is a princess, and there would be no need to say anything about it, except that she is always in danger of forgetting her rank, and behaving as if she had grown out of the mud. I have seen little princesses behave like children of thieves and lying beggars, and that is why they need to be told they are princesses. And that is why when I tell a story of this kind, I like to tell it about a princess. Then I can say better what I mean, because I can then give her every beautiful thing I want her to have."

"Please go on."

******

We are, each and every one of us, made by a king. And not just any king, but the King of the universe, the King of love, who longs to adopt us and make us children and heirs in his royal family. Doesn't that take your breath?

I confess this has been on my mind again this week because we're in the midst of a family re-read of A Little Princess. When we traveled last weekend, I let the sweet girl choose which books she'd like us to take for reading in the car, and this is one she especially wanted again. It's my favorite (by far) of Frances Hodgson Burnett's books, and I love to read it aloud. And despite some moments of old-fashioned sentimentality that ring a bit oddly to our contemporary ears, or maybe because of them, there are moments in the story that move me to tears. When Sara is banished to the lonely attic and finds her life degraded and impoverished, it is by continuing to imagine that she is a princess that she finds the strength to be brave, kind, and generous, even to those who treat her terribly.

It reminds me of how C.S. Lewis encourages us to "pretend" to be what we're not -- not hypocritically, but as practice to become what we most want and long to be. He calls it "dressing up as Christ." As he writes in Mere Christianity:

Why? What is the good of pretending to be what you are not? Well, even on the human level, you know, there are two kinds of pretending. There is a bad kind, where the pretence is there instead of the real thing; as when a man pretends he is going to help you instead of really helping you. But there is also a good kind, where the pretence leads up to the real thing. When you are not feeling particularly friendly but know you ought to be, the best thing you can do, very often, is to put on a friendly manner and behave as if you were a nicer person than you actually are. And in a few minutes, as we have all noticed, you will be really feeling friendlier than you were. Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already. That is why children’s games are so important. They are always pretending to be grownups—playing soldiers, playing shop. But all the time, they are hardening their muscles and sharpening their wits so that the pretence of being grown-up helps them to grow up in earnest.

The Power of Stories

I love reading stories about stories. That is, I love reading stories about the way stories affect people's lives, both as readers and writers.

I stumbled upon two of those I thoroughly enjoyed yesterday. I recognized my reader/writer self in both.

The first was in yesterday's entry from Anita Silvey's Children's Book-a-Day Almanac. If you haven't checked that website out yet, you're in for a treat.

Yesterday's entry was, fittingly, about a children's biography of Lincoln. It's one I haven't read yet but now plan to. What struck me about her description of the book was this piece of an anecdote about her first read-through of the book:

The first time I read this book, I was flying to Washington, D.C., to give a speech. When I came to the end, I was sobbing, and the attendant came to me and said, “Miss, is anything wrong?” “Oh yes,” I blurted out, "Lincoln has been shot!”

Yes! The best stories pull us into their narrative with that sense of immediacy. It doesn't matter how old a grief is, we experience it anew as we walk through it again. It's one reason why I often feel bereft when I've finished a truly great biography, because I've just spent a season in the company of someone I've come to love and admire (or understand more deeply) and usually I've walked through their death toward the end of the tale. Sometimes the juxtaposition of living through a life and death, so close together, can leave you a bit breathless. Or in tears on an airplane.

Then there was this bit from a book I'm reading about the life and work of Katherine Paterson. I stumbled upon it when looking for other books by Gary Schmidt; I think it might be his first book and might even have started life as a dissertation. I confess I am becoming a huge fan of Gary Schmidt's (I'll save that for another post) and of course I've been a great enthusiast about Kat Paterson's work since I was twenty. So the combination of author/subject was too good to pass up.

In the introductory essay, Schmidt is exploring Paterson's childhood, and how she was deeply affected by her family's many moves. Her parents were missionaries in China during a time of great tumult there, and they kept yo-yo'ing back and forth between the States and China. Paterson had been born in China and spent her first five years there, and was in many ways more deeply at home in Chinese culture than American culture. When they moved to Virginia in 1937, not long before she began school, she recalled how much she hated it and how terribly displaced she felt.

"When I was in the first grade I didn't get any valentines. I don't think I was disliked. I was totally overlooked," he quotes Paterson as saying. And then Schmidt goes on to say "This incident, too, was to become part of the gathering of stories: 'My mother grieved over this event until her death,' (he quotes Paterson again) "asking me once why I didn't write a story about the time I didn't get any valentines. 'But mother,' I said, 'all my stories are about the time I didn't get any valentines.'"

I had a lump in my throat at the end of that line. It not only rings so deeply true to the best of Katherine Paterson's work (she writes more eloquently of displacement and childhood longing than almost anyone I know) but it rings true to my writer's heart. I suspect there are certain formative moments in most of our childhoods, some of them joyous and some sad and lonely, which we are always writing "out of" no matter what else we're writing. We don't have to describe an actual event or memory to have that moment at the back of what we're doing in a story.

I'd like to spend more time with the Paterson book (and Schmidt) in another post. And maybe more time thinking through what sorts of moments are the formative fountains of my own stories. I'll bet you have some of those moments too.

Sister Lit

Earlier today I posted a review of Laura Ingalls Wilder's By the Shores of Silver Lake, the fifth book in the Little House series. And one that I always forget how much I love until I read it again.

As I was writing, I found myself thinking about the way Laura and Mary's relationship shapes the narrative. This is the book in which we discover that Mary has become blind, the consequence of scarlet fever. It's also the book where Pa tells Laura, more than once, that she needs to "become Mary's eyes." And so Laura, ever dutiful, truly takes that task on. She describes everything she sees out there on the Dakota prairie to her sister, often in incredible detail.

As the sweet girl and I were reading the book through, we talked about that -- about the way in which Laura learned to describe things vividly and with such care. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that the real-life experience of being a companion to her blind sister probably helped to shape the kind of writer that Wilder became, the writer who loves to pour on detail after detail so that we "see" right along with her.

The Laura-Mary relationship of Little House has always been one of the cores of the series for me. It colors so much, from the way Laura compares her own mischievous behavior to Mary's ladylike behavior when they're little girls, to the ways in which Laura tends to ally herself with Pa's adventurous wandering spirit over against the gentler, more domestic instincts of Ma and Mary, right down through their deepening friendship as Laura "becomes her eyes" and later works hard as a school-teacher to help provide Mary the opportunity to study in a special college. I've often felt that Mary's patient forbearance always seemed almost too good to be true, and wondered if Laura didn't overly-sentimentalize this portrait of her sister...though maybe not. Maybe Mary really did have those deeply-engrained virtues. And certainly Laura's loving respect for this sister, so different from her herself, shines through.

I'd never made the connection until this evening, but it struck me that the Laura-Mary relationship has a prelude in the Jo-Beth relationship of Little Women (with perhaps a dash of the Jo-Amy relationship sprinkled into the earlier books). Beth too suffered through scarlet fever, and though it didn't leave her blind, it left her heart so weak she became an invalid. Beth too is portrayed, far more than Mary even, as a real saint, especially in the midst of such suffering. Her loss is the turning point in Jo's character development and story. And of course, like Wilder's stories, Alcott's were based on her real family and growing up years, with her sister portraits based on her real sisters.

Sister literature is powerful, isn't it? Austen delved deeply into it too, though her stories were much less overtly autobiographical. But Jane too had a sister she loved deeply, Cassandra, and I've sometimes wondered how much of their relationship seeped into the storied relationships of Elizabeth-Jane and Elinor-Marianne. So many people see romance as the beating heart of every Austen novel, but to me, it often seems as those the sister relationships are the real core, especially in Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility.

When you contemplate sister lit, what fictional sister pairings come to mind for you?

It Turns Out She's Tib

The sweet girl and I have both had a difficult week, individually and together. This isn't a place I've designated for whining (I save that for my precious & patient husband, or my journal, and sometimes my prayers -- I'm SO thankful God is patient and really wants to hear what's on my heart!) so I'll just say that it's been a week full of learnings for us both. And a week to try my patience on.

In the midst of the hard stuff, some of which is just mundane, tiring stuff, one bright spot has been our daily read-aloud time. For S. is absolutely loving -- nay, adoring -- the first Betsy-Tacy books. We read the first three around the time she was five, and she seemed to enjoy them then, but I guess it was a bit early. She claimed not to remember them very well. But judging from her delighted response now, she is definitely ready for them!

We zipped through Betsy-Tacy and moved right on in to Betsy-Tacy and Tib. "Could we ready just ONE more chapter please?" has been the week's mantra. And yes, I'm a sucker, especially when it comes to reading books I love so much. Despite not getting nearly enough done this week on a number of writing, teaching and household projects, I find myself saying "sure! yes! you bet!" and we read another chapter.

The most eye-opening thing for me has been to see her response to Tib. I've always related most to Betsy (the imaginative story-teller) and in some respects to Tacy (I was just about that desperately shy in my very earliest years) but the sweet girl, with her strongly literal streak, really "gets" Tib. When Betsy plans something outrageous and Tib looks admiring but politely skeptical...well, let's just say the sweet girl understands that look. After all, jumping off things really ISN'T flying, though it sure is fun to do it, and OK, Betsy, we'll humor you and call it flying. And hey, by the way, mixing everything you can find in the kitchen in one big pan really ISN'T cooking, and probably is going to taste pretty bad. But OK, Betsy, we know it will be fun if we do it together, especially if you make up a song about it.

It makes me chuckle to see how much my daughter relates to Tib, and it also gives me insight into some of the ways in which she and I relate to one another. I guess good story-telling does that: holds up mirrors for us, mirrors we can look into and see reflections of ourselves and others, or at least reflections that remind us of different parts of who we are. And yes, it's true, there really ISN'T a palace inside the mirror, and beautiful Aunt Dolly really lives in Milwaukee anyway, not a palace. But OK, Betsy, we'll all get mirrors and pretend we're walking on the ceiling because it sure is fun to imagine. Especially when we can do it together.

Literary Influences

I've been thinking a lot about literary influences lately. Partly this stems from all the reading I've been doing, especially in the fantasy genre, where more and more I see things bubbling in the giant "cauldron of story" that J.R.R. Tolkien talked about. Sometimes it's difficult to know just who put what in the pot first, or when and how an author added his or her own special ingredients or gave it a unique stir.

I find it fascinating to wonder how certain stories grew, especially when elements jump out as being so similar in tone or atmosphere to another (often earlier) work. Did the author borrow directly? Did the author perhaps read that other work once at a crucial place in their own formation and development as a person or writer? Did they read it over and over and perhaps soak the story in so deeply that they no longer know where that story finishes and their own starts?

Or are the similarities "coincidental" or unconscious? Could it be that author A has never read author B, but they both share a love of author C (or even art or music or poetry D) and that influence has permeated their work in similar ways, giving their very different stories a similar flavor or scent?

Or is it that there really are only so many stories that can be told in this world, despite the huge variety of people who live them and tell them? Could it be that our shared humanity runs so deep that our memories/experiences are more kin than we usually acknowledge?

And how much does shared genre shape an author's choice? If a writer knows that he or she is plowing familiar territory in a certain kind work, do they perhaps choose to draw (or find themselves drawing naturally) on certain images, character types, symbols, and even narrative rhythms?

I find this whole topic fascinating, but I also find myself welcoming the opportunity to widen the discussion of literary influence beyond mere echoes and similarities of content and style. I recently finished a book that does just that: Diana Pavlac Glyer's The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community.

Although it's not just about Lewis, Glyer's book has joined what I'm coming to think of as my canon of personal favorite books about C.S. Lewis. It's a painstaking and highly readable work of scholarship. More than the meticulous research that went into it, however, and the many new facts I learned about some of my favorite authors, I enjoyed it for its fresh approach to the topic of the Inklings. Glyer asks readers to consider the question of literary influence in much broader perspective than we usually consider it (the context I laid out in the earlier part of this post). She looks at the way community fosters influence, assessing mutual influence by looking not just at similar writing style or writing interest, but by looking at the ways writers in community affect one another as "resonators, opponents/critics, editors, collaborators, and referents." She then proceeds to look at the interaction of the Inklings in light of those categories.

The book gave me much to think about as a reader and a writer, and as someone who appreciates the writing friends and community I have (and longs for more). What role do our writing friends, our resonators, play in our creativity? A far larger role than we might guess, I think.

All of which leads me back to the thoughts that fascinate me about the "echoes" I hear in certain stories. We may never know what lies behind a certain turn of phrase, a choice of image, a decision about a character. But we can be sure that such writerly choices are not made in isolation, even if a writer thinks they're working completely "on their own." There's really no such thing as "on you're own" when you join in the long conversation of creativity that flows down through the ages. When you step up to the pot to create your "own" recipe, you never really start from scratch.

Here, There and Everywhere There Be Dragons

I discovered the other day that when you post a status update to Facebook about something you're considering writing, you might be surprised by how much feedback you get.

I posted this little musing: that I was pondering (just pondering, mind you!) a re-telling of St. George and the Dragon for beginning readers. To put it mildly, I was amazed by the enthusiasm this musing generated. How wonderful to hear those words of encouragement. It makes me think I really ought to try it!

The difficulty I'm facing right now is finding the time to dive into any more new projects. I've started several in July, what is meant to be my serious writing month (meaning the only month where the sweet girl is in camp enough to give me some real daylight hours in which to work). I'm posting a number of reviews at Eps because we need the income, but I'm also working on several longer-term projects: two essays, one potentially longer non-fiction book, and some fiction.

The St. George idea sort of winged me out of nowhere the other day. I've had dragons on the brain, as you can probably tell from my recent posting on re-reading (in which I contemplated some of the differences in Tolkien and Rowling's treatment of dragons). The sweet girl and I are in the midst of a read-aloud of The Silver Chair, where Eustace Scrub (former dragon!) has yet another starring role. I've been working on a story (with a contemporary setting) that combines some elements of Sleeping Beauty and St. George and the Dragon (both princes-fighting-dragon stories). And I've been thinking about the particular gifts of really good writers for beginning-intermediate readers like the sweet girl.

Thinking about St. George led me to Margaret Hodges and Trina Schart Hyman's gorgeous, oh so gorgeous, picture book version. It's a Caldecott Medal winner, just stunning.

But I know that's only one take on the legend of George, merrie saint of England. I'm particularly interested right now in different versions of the legend, and in what visual images and colors recur most often through the different re-tellings. I went to the Baldwin Online Children's Literature project, my favorite repository of old stories and legends, and searched on "St. George" within the site. LOTS of versions popped up, and I've only had time so far to read a couple.

At any rate, I do seem to be finding dragons everywhere I turn. A friend wrote me today (yes, via FB) to say she'd recently purchased a small stuffed dragon to keep beside her while she works on the fantasy book she's writing. And I just finished Regina Doman's dark and thrilling contemporary Gothic fairy-tale Black as Night in which the New York subway system was wonderfully described as a fire-breathing dragon (and a terrific fight scene takes place near the third rail underground).

So if anyone wants to share any more good dragon stories or illustrations, St. George or otherwise, let me know!

"Welcome to Struggleville"

February has presented some struggles, of the ordinary garden-variety type of struggle. I've struggled to pay our bills, to meet work deadlines, to not feel overwhelmed by too much to do, to prioritize wisely, and to get enough rest. Given our lives and our budget, it's always a struggle for me and D. to get a babysitter and actually go on a date, but that's finally what we did last night (our first evening out in almost three months)!

Given all the ordinary struggles lately, it was perhaps appropriate that our date was to a concert by the amazing musician/songwriter Bill Mallonee. And yes, he performed "Welcome to Struggleville" in the course of the evening.

D. and I were reminiscing and realizing this is the third time we've seen Bill Mallonee in concert. The first time was back around 1992 (we think) not long after we got married. Mallonee was the front-man for a then relatively new group called "Vigilantes of Love." They actually played in the lower lounge area of one of our college's buildings and they completely rocked the place out.

We saw him again around the year 2000 (at least we're pretty sure) when he performed solo as the opening act for "Over the Rhine" at a college near here.

And then last night, where he performed for a small audience of about 40 people at a local church, his wife occasionally accompanying him on keyboard and vocals. But still mostly just Mallonee with his guitar and harmonica and those amazing, gut-wrenching lyrics that truly capture what it means to struggle and yearn and grow as a human being.

I liked last night best. I don't think it was just the place I happened to find myself in (inwardly) though that might have had something to do with it. Seeing someone perform three times, those performances several years apart, is eye-opening. When we first saw him, he was kind of a young grunge rocker with a cool band. We were relatively young ourselves, and it was just a loud, boisterous, fun, communal kind of evening filled with lots of energy. When we saw him the second time, in a hot-box of a gym crammed with people, the solo performance was both energizing and exhausting. I remember remarking to D. that his energy felt almost manic, and it was mesmerizing but a bit disconcerting, to watch.

The energy is still there. But he's is in his fifties now, and age is showing. It's showing in craggy lines on his face, and in slower, less jerky (though still intense) body movements. It's also showing in slightly slower renditions of his songs from time to time ("Struggleville" was a lot slower than we'd ever heard it) but I loved that, because it was easier to fall into the rhythms of his highly narrative lyrics. He's tapping more and more into his folk rock and Americana roots, a la Dylan and Woody Guthrie (my husband even thinks he's starting to look like Woody Guthrie, and he may be right!).

It hit me last night that Mallonee is really, first and foremost, a chronicler, a storyteller. He tends to tell stories with his songs, sometimes in third person, sometimes in first person, and the lives he chronicles are always ragged, broken, right on the edge, people striving to survive. He performed one of my favorites last night: "Skin" (a song about Vincent Van Gogh, sung from the perspective of his brother Theo) but he also performed songs that told the stories of a Vietnam veteran recovering from post-traumatic stress, an explorer who became lost while attempting to find the summit of Everest. And of course, he described the citizens of Struggleville...a place, it turns out, where we've all lived, or at least visited for extended periods of time.

But for the first time last night, I sensed more of a serenity as he sang. That may sound strange, given the subjects he sings about and his still intense level of energy, but it was how I felt. I don't know much about the man's life, but that's just the sense I got. As though he's accepted the struggle, but has also accepted moments of peace that come dropping slow even in the midst of struggle. As though he himself is not singing from a place of struggle so much as trying, with all his might, to call our compassionate attention and our listening ears to hear the struggle going on in ordinary (and extraordinary) lives all around us.

It was good.

There are some very homemade videos on YouTube which are fun to check out (Bill playing at a backyard barbecue, also a library...the man will apparently play anywhere and everywhere, and such humility feels rare, especially for someone who has been named one of the 100 best living songwriters by Paste Magazine!). Here's a link for "Nothing Like a Train" and another one for "Solar System," two terrific songs we heard for the first time last night.

Just Because I Don't Want to Forget This

The sweet girl was sound asleep when I went in to get her up this morning. I gently woke her and then, after giving a few stretches and yawns, she crawled sleepily onto my lap. We don't seem to have quite as many of these cuddly moments (now that she's a big girl of almost six and a half) as we used to, so I treasure every second of warm little girl in white kitty-cat pajamas scrunched up under fleece blankets and resting on my lap that I can get.

I asked her if she slept well and she said yes. Then, still bleary-eyed, but clearly beginning to wake up, she announced the following tale. I'll write it as clearly as I can remember it...there were a few pauses where I prompted her with general "and then what" kinds of questions. But here it is, complete and unabridged.

"Last night before I fell asleep, I made up a story about a family named the Thursdays. They have three children, twin girls and a baby boy. And they went to the park and the store and ran some errands. They had a picnic at the park. There were two slides there, and they were the same length. The twin girls slid down the slides and the one that got to the bottom of her slide first won. And then they bought a watermelon at the store. The post office and the store just took a few minutes, so after that they went to a restaurant to eat some dinner and then they came home."

Wow. So I'm not the only one in this household who makes up stories before I fall asleep! Kind of nice to know.

Shannon Hale on Story

Shannon Hale is becoming one of my favorite writers. The YA fantasy writer (who has also written one book for adults, Austenland) continues to delight me with courageous coming-of-age tales. They're deeply satisfying stories and also contain beautifully crafted prose. I reviewed her 2006 Newbery award winning Princess Academy last year, and just recently finished reading and reviewing The Goose Girl, her first novel published in 2003.

I've also become a visitor to Hale's blog Squeetus, a refreshing place to visit. She not only shares with great enthusiasm about her life as a published author, but generously offers peeks into her creative process.

This week she posted a link to a piece she wrote for School Library Journal. Called "How Reader Girl Got Her Groove Back", it's an autobiographical essay in which she reflects on how being force fed the classics, then taught a completely analytical approach to studying literature in college, then taught how to write literary fiction in grad school, almost killed her love of reading. She speaks candidly of how she rediscovered the joyful "reader girl" inside her, the one that used to read with a light under the covers until her eyes gave out, and then fell asleep splayed over a book. (Been there, done that!)

I mention it here not only because it's worth reading in full, but because I found myself needing/wanting to muse aloud about some of what she wrote.

I resonated with much of what she says. I went through a long period of time where I felt like the reading and writing I loved most was always considered "secondary" or somehow less than profound, primarily because much of it could be found on children's or young adult's shelves. I got over that a while ago, especially after trying and failing to read (with any real engagement or passion) a number of contemporary "adult" novelists. I'm not saying that I couldn't find any contemporary novelists writing stories that gripped me, but the ones I usually loved either wrote some form of genre fiction (read: 'non-serious' or 'non-literary') or else straddled the worlds of adult and young adult or children's fiction -- writers like Madeleine L'Engle or Jon Hassler. In the case of the latter two, there were other red flags showing they wouldn't pass muster as "serious literature" in many colleges -- they were both steeped in faith-based worldviews and, in Madeleine's case at least, dabbled in fantasy.

For a long time I had difficulty putting my finger on why I didn't "fit in" with the MFA program I attended for two weeks the year I turned 24 (just several months before I got married). I had been accepted as a potential candidate: in other words, I was there on trial. And what a trial. Fresh out of college, at least a handful of years younger than the other students in the program, I went thinking I'd spend two weeks writing and reading and getting excited about stories with other people who loved stories too. There were pockets of that passion there, and I did learn, but mostly what I found were rather jaded literary type folks who liked to smoke, sip cocktails, network with published authors, write depressing stories, and talk about postmodernism, a concept that I had barely even heard of at the time (which is funny to think about now)! I still remember sitting dumbfounded through a workshop in which we analyzed a short story made up entirely of one sentence (one very, very long, rambling sentence). My faith life and the fact that I sometimes wrote stories with child protagonists didn't get me very far either. The mentor assigned to me seemed bored with my child-likeness. In my closing meeting with her, she simply urged me to find "my voice" and handed me a pre-printed list of all the things I should read if I ever seriously wanted to be a writer. I'd hardly read any of them.

I do think there can be a place for what's termed literary fiction. It can even be written well. But beautiful words that don't lead anywhere are, in the end, just beautiful words, no matter how nicely put together. I long ago realized those are not usually the stories that set my heart pounding, make me laugh or cry, or keep me turning pages, the kind of story worth reading again and again and again the way I kept returning to Alcott, Lewis, Lovelace and L'Engle as a child, the way I began to return also to Tolkien, Austen and others in my young adulthood.

Today I've simply come to accept the fact that most of the best contemporary literature is being written for children and young adults. Perhaps because the writers for those audiences know that the audiences still care deeply about story (take a look at my Epinions profile sometime if you want to see more of my musings on the subject) and expect a good one. And I'm profoundly grateful for writers like Hale who care passionately about delivering a good, cathartic story with a beginning, middle and end and yet also care passionately about beautiful language.

And YET...there always has to be an "and yet" doesn't there?

I am not ready to give up on classical literature. I believe passionately in the value of reading old books as well as new ones (I've imbibed too much Lewisian thought not to value that!). Although I'm sure that my daughter will gobble up many good, contemporary books on the children's and YA shelves as she grows older (and I'm compiling a list now of some of the best ones...Hale's on it) I don't want that to be her only fare. We need a good diet of old and new to nourish our hearts, minds and imaginations.

I think it's very true that being force-fed books you aren't ready for, or being taught to read classics primarily as a lesson in how to analyze and tear apart a story for symbols and themes can kill a love of reading. I don't want that to happen to my daughter: I want her "reader girl" personality to still be shining through at 10, 13, and 16, just as it shines through now at 6 when she trips excitedly into the kitchen to read me a Richard Scarry story while I'm loading the dishwasher. But I don't think it necessarily follows that being given the classics, even some of the so-called great books of the western canon, must dampen a reader's enthusiasm. (It's one reason I'm excited about John Granger's work with the English literary tradition and its influence/connection to JK Rowling's Harry Potter stories...John is truly excited about the idea that with Harry Potter as a "shared text," this generation has a unique and wonderful springboard into understanding and appreciating the great books in a new way.)

Of course I'm not saying Hale doesn't value old stories. That would be silly indeed, given the fact that her novel The Goose Girl, for instance, is based on the Grimm fairytale of the same name. What excites me no end is the way the best stories draw on the stories that come before them, continuing a conversation or engaging in a dance that started long before. So let's give our daughters Hale's marvelous novel, and then let's turn them loose (if they haven't encountered it already) with Andrew Lang's The Blue Fairy Book. Old and new, together.

No, in this thoughtful essay, Hale is simply relating her own experiences regarding what helped bring her back to a passionate love of reading. I resonate with those experiences: in fact, they feel so familiar to me that I found myself inwardly nodding. But I would say that teachers and teaching methodology are often more at fault than the books any of us were given. Classics are, by definition, old, books that have stood the test of time. Most of them have stood the test of time for a reason, but the very fact of their age means that most of us don't find them easy reading, we need keys to help us unlock their joys. Not all classics are created equal (if it's true now that not every writer writes good stories, it's certainly always been true). But there are plenty of "old stories" that we can give to our children in ways that will help nourish that "reader girl" (or "reader boy") inside them. At least that's my hope!