Why Write for Children? Final Comments
With so much that is overwhelming going on in the larger world, this exploration of the psyches of that small group of people who write for children might seem self-indulgent. And yet if anything matters at all, it is our individual journeys.
Human needs are so complex and childhood so foundational that we all spend our lives healing. Or acting out our inability to heal. Even if there were no other child hole to fill, consider that we are, each of us, thrust from the womb where every need was met before need could be known into a world of light and noise and cold and hunger . . . and separation. Is it any surprise that, for all the sweetness of these lives we have been given, we struggle?
Long, long ago, I set out to be a perfect parent. I was going to correct every error my parents ever made, and I could name them all. In reality, of course, I repeated some of their failures and came up with plenty of my own. And if I have learned anything in this long life, it is that demanding perfection of ourselves is one of the biggest barriers to becoming who we are meant to be. We are, each of us, a messy gathering of abilities and vulnerabilities. What matters is whether we use what we have been given to affirm or to destroy.
Every children’s writer I know is working, heart and soul, to affirm. And we are using our own substance to do so.
But what does this working out of our own needs do for the children who receive our offerings? It acknowledges their struggles and opens doors to their own healing. It also creates empathy in those whose experience is different. Children’s books as both mirrors and windows. They work magnificently either way. And because story operates at the level of feeling, because we don’t simply observe the journey, we live it, those mirrors and windows have the power to transform.
I can’t count the number of letters I have received about On My Honor, my Newbery Honor novel, published in 1986. The letters from children would reach into the thousands, and sometimes even the classroom-generated ones—which often tell me as much or more about the teacher assigning them as about the child doing the writing—reach deep. Occasionally these days, though, I receive a letter about On My Honor from an adult who read it decades earlier, the letter written because the story still lives in someone’s heart. Which means my own deep questions about responsibility and loss, my own wonder at the holiness of life given, of life lost has nurtured and sustained another person’s questions, another person’s wonder, too. And that is why I—that is why any of us—write for children.
“Life,” I have often said to my students, “is just one damn thing after another. Story is life selected for meaning.” And while stories are creating meaning, they heal. The teller and the one receiving the telling.
These days I seem to have moved past the need to heal on the page. The emotional thrust that sustained my fiction for nearly half a century has quieted. Which means I’m stepping back, leaving story in the hands of those whose call is more urgent. But I’m still exploring, still learning, and I still have things to say.
As my own days shorten, I am suffused with the wonder of life, of all life. Thus, The Stuff of Stars. Thus, We, the Curious Ones. Thus, other picture books still in the pipeline . . . and at least one more living in my heart without having yet reached the page.
I couldn’t be more grateful for the work I have been given, for the small ways I have been able to touch the world. I couldn’t be more grateful for the healing I have worked through, lived through, offered to that world.
And I couldn’t be more grateful for the gift of such a rich, productive, satisfying life.
