Serendipity
Every single day I give thanks for the multiple kinds of serendipity that gave me my career.
That’s not to discount the work I’ve done. I’ve written steadily and hard. For a very long time. When my children were young, they sometimes had reason to resent my devotion to my typewriter. And when my daughter was herself a mother, she once said in my presence, quite without rancor, “My mother is not a cookie-baking, babysitting grandma.” And I thought, I’m not, am I?
I would have liked to be, but by the time those grandchildren arrived, I’d left the marriage that had made my early career possible and was working fiercely to survive.
It was serendipity, though, that I began writing with the dream of publishing in the mid 1970’s. That was the time when middle-grade fiction had just opened to what was called “the New Realism in children’s literature.” So the topics publishers were looking for happened to be the ones that occupied my truthteller’s heart.
Why was I so intent on being a truthteller for children? I had grown up in a time when the young were routinely lied to. The lies were supposed to protect us, of course, though it didn’t take me long to understand that the protection was actually meant for the comfort of adults. And my mother was better at that kind of “protecting” than most. (When my aunt divorced in a family where divorce was unthinkable, I asked one day, bewildered, “Didn’t there used to be an Uncle Kenny?” My mother simply said, “No.”)
Thus I launched my career with a mission. Children deserved the truth! And the topic of my first novel, Foster Child, published as my second, was sexual abuse. (I had foster children at the time and having seen how frequently such abuse happened, I was furious. Curiously, it was only years later that I connected my fury with my own early experience.) Such a topic for middle graders would have been unthinkable only a few years earlier. It was still close to unthinkable then. And serendipity again, I happened upon James Cross Giblin of Clarion Books, probably the only editor at the time with the courage to take on such a topic. Which got me launched.
More serendipity. In 1987, just as I was gathering to leave my marriage of almost thirty years, On My Honor was awarded a Newbery Honor. (The award to be bestowed in ’88.) Every award, any award involves at least as much luck as merit. For each winner, there are always at least a dozen other books that are equally deserving.
The Newbery Honor made my new life possible in ways I had never dreamed. I moved out with a few dollars in my pocket and without a clue about where the next penny would come from. (I remember emerging from the grocery store on the day I moved into my apartment wondering whether I would ever be able to return.) But as the results of the award trickled in, On My Honor kept selling in new ways.
And there was more. Children’s writers who garner attention are in demand as speakers, sometimes for gatherings of teachers and librarians, often for students in schools. Many of us at that time earned as much of our income speaking in schools as we did from royalties.
Lecturing was hard, hard work. Repetitious work. It involved, not only being on display—something few writers long for—but repeating the same words multiple times a day. Something every writer I know abhors. And repeating those too-often-spoken words with enough enthusiasm to engage a young, wiggly, or a somewhat older, jaded audience!
Lecturing also involved travel. Lots of travel. I remember waking in the night in a hotel room with no idea where I might be. I knew I was in a hotel. What I didn’t know was where I was in the country. I went through several possibilities, places I had been recently, before landing finally on California. Yes, I was in California. And with that knowledge, I could go back to sleep.
Yet, hard as it was, I always knew it was work I was privileged to have. Lecturing helped keep me afloat. And it let me know that my work had an actual audience, something no writer can take for granted. (Publishing a book is a little like having a child grow up and leave home who forgets to write or call.)
The most profound good fortune of all, though, was being born with a love of words, a feeling for stories. A wholly unearned brain setting. Nothing I did, nothing anyone did, could have brought that about. My ability to tell stories was simply gifted me along with my greenish eyes and blondish hair. Serendipity!
Today, I look back on work that has both compelled and nurtured. Work that has filled me up and emptied me out. Work that has been as fundamental to my existence as breathing.
And my gratitude knows no bounds!
