I began this blog in 2012 at the request of an editor.  She wanted me to write about my just-published novel in verse, Little Dog Lost.

Poetry novels certainly weren’t new to children’s literature in 2012.  The first I’m aware of was Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust, which won the Newbery Award in 1998.  Karen is a poet, and I believe it was her editor who suggested she rewrite her novel as poetry.  But I am not a poet, and turning fiction into verse was entirely new for me.  In fact, when I taught in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program in Writing for Children and Young Adults, I sometimes discouraged my students from attempting such a thing.  “Poetry novels,” I told them, with an authoritative sniff, “are usually neither.  They aren’t poetry, and they don’t really work as novels.”

But then I found myself writing one. 

Most poetry novels at that time were hard-hitting, first-person, young adult.  I chose to use verse for younger readers—I would never use the word poetry—because I’d been writing young novellas for several years; I loved the kinds of stories I could bring to that audience, but I was tired of the short sentences required to make the text accessible.  That wasn’t my natural style.  So I said to myself one day, “What if I broke my lines to make it verse?  Could delivering bite-sized chunks make the decoding easier while freeing me to write more fluidly?”

(A teacher once told me that her students had taken delight in counting the number of words in one of my very long but accessible sentences.)

Writing in this new-to-me way turned out to be fun.  I even enjoyed blogging about my process afterward.  Then, since the blog was there waiting to be filled, I moved on to other topics.  I blogged weekly for a number of years before dropping back to bi-weekly before dropping back to occasionally.  Before dropping back to not-very-often at all. 

In fact, this blog has become so occasional that I sometimes get a message from one of my followers asking whether I’m all right.  And I am.  All right.

But I’m an all-right 86-year-old which is a somewhat different kind of right.  And even though I still have books moving slowly through the publishing pipeline, I seem to be running out of things to say.  Or the will to say them.  Except for these end-of-career musings.

I’m not sure whether a website meant to showcase my books is the right place to talk about winding down a career, but it’s what I have to say.

I’ve been a storyteller all my life, first telling stories inside my head or sharing them with childhood friends as part of our play, then laboriously applying them to paper, and then writing for publication.  And I have always assumed I would never leave that story world behind.  Writing has given my life meaning and purpose.  Writing has given me a reason to be. 

(I once saw an obituary in The Authors Guild Bulletin that said, “He was writing two hours before he died,” and I thought, I want that to be me!)

However, there seems to be an uncomfortable truth in what the critic and author James Marcus has said: “With writers who survive into their old age, my sense is that sometimes the spirit is willing, but the ability to get it onto the page starts to wane.”

My spirit is still willing.  Eager, even.  But the emotional energy that has always generated stories is slipping away.  Longing lies at the core of every story, and it is longing itself that no longer compels. 

I’m convinced that most children’s writers tell the stories we do for the audience we do in order to heal some primal wound.  To play it out again—whatever it is—and make it come out right this time.  But I never expected that healing to come into the real world.  Yet here I am, the pain that underlay my work increasingly integrated into a more meaningful whole; accepted, even embraced, along with the much larger good.

I love being the old woman I am now.  And I don’t even have to consider the alternative to love it.  (I have a friend who says, “Anyone born in the same year I was is either old or dead!”)  Age brings loss, of course.  Many losses.  I’ve never tried to count the people in my telephone contacts list who can no longer be reached.  But it also brings—at least for me—a profound contentment.  A profoundly earned contentment.  Not because all is right with the world.  Clearly, so much is not right with the world.  (Has it ever been?)  But because I am learning to accept what is.  To live into it.  Whatever it might be.

So from time to time, I fill this new emptiness that has descended on my days by finding something like this piece to write, knowing there are a few on the other side who will read it.  Or I frame a carefully crafted email for a single reader.  Or I prepare a meal, an act of creation that, being a daily necessity, is in little danger of slipping away. 

Or recently I turned a day into a retreat, sitting in the comfortable chair in the corner of my study to read long-forgotten journals.  Exploring nothing more than myself.

And I encountered these words.  I don’t know when I wrote them, but I seem to have been responding to a question.  Something like, “How might you sum up your life at the end?”  Despite the slowing of my creative juices, I feel nowhere near that end.  Yet what I said in that forgotten time speaks to me.

It was this:

I am here.  I am glad to be here . . . to have been.  I don’t need to write anymore.  I am myself the words.  The words have been needed, but now they are all spent—all spent and all taken back into myself.  The words are me.  I am the word made flesh.  I am that I am.

It is good.