I get to meet Lois Lowry!!!

[sweetnpetite]

I am so excited. I am going to meet the author of Anastia Again!, and also "The Giver" (for which she one the Newberry Award)

But who cares about that! She wrote the Anistasia Books! Can you tell I'm excited???!!!

 

[sweetnpetite]

Newbery Acceptance Speech
Lois Lowry
June, 1994
“How do you know where to start?” a child asked me once, in a
schoolroom, where I’d been speaking to her class about the writing of books. I
shrugged and smiled and told her that I just start wherever it feels right.
This evening it feels right to start by quoting a passage from The Giver,
a scene set during the days in which the boy, Jonas, is beginning to look more
deeply into the life that has been very superficial, beginning to see that his own
past goes back farther than he had ever known and has greater implications
than he had ever suspected.
“…now he saw the familiar wide river beside the path differently. He saw
all of the light and color and history it contained and carried in its slow-moving
water; and he knew that there was an Elsewhere from which it came, and an
Elsewhere to which it was going.”
Every author is asked again and again the question we probably each
have come to dread the most: HOW DID YOU GET THIS IDEA?
We give glib, quick answers because there are other hands raised, other
kids in the audience waiting.
I’d like, tonight, to dispense with my usual flippancy and glibness and try
to tell you the origins of this book. It is a little like Jonas looking into the river
and realizing that it carries with it everything that has come from an
Elsewhere. A spring, perhaps, at the beginning, bubbling up from the earth;
then a trickle from a glacier; a mountain stream entering farther along; and
each tributary bringing with it the collected bits and pieces from the past, from
the distant, from the countless Elsewheres: all of it moving, mingled, in the
current.
For me, the tributaries are memories, and I’ve selected only a few. I’ll
tell them to you chronologically. I have to go way back. I’m starting 46 years
ago.
In 1948, I am eleven years old. I have gone with my mother, sister, and
brother to join my father, who has been in Tokyo for two years and will be there
for several more.
We live there, in the center of that huge Japanese city, in a small
American enclave with a very American name: Washington Heights. We live
in an American style house, with American neighbors, and our little
community has its own movie theater, which shows American movies; and a
small church, a tiny library, and an elementary school, and in many ways it is
an odd replica of a United States village.
(In later, adult yhears I was to ask my mother why we had lived there
instead of taking advantage of the opportunity to live within the Japanese
community and to learn and experience a different way of life. But she seemed
surprised by my question. She said that we lived where we did because it was
comfortable. It was familiar. It was safe.)
At eleven years old I am not a particularly adventurous child, nor am I a
rebellious one. But I have always been curious.
I have a bicycle. Again and again – countless times without my parents’
knowledge – I ride my bicycle out the back gate of the fence that surrounds our
comfortable, familiar, safe American community. I ride down a hill because I
am curious and I enter, riding down that hill, an unfamiliar, slightly
uncomfortable, perhaps even unsafe … though I never feel it to be … area of
Tokyo that throbs with life.
It is a district called Shibuya. It is crowded with shops and people and
theaters and street vendors and the day-to- day bustle of Japanese life.
I remember, still, after all these years, the smells: fish and fertilizer and
charcoal; the sounds: music and shouting and the clatter of wooden shoes and
wooden sticks and wooden wheels; and the colors: I remember the babies and
toddlers dressed in bright pink and orange and red, most of all, but I remember,
too, the dark blue uniforms of the school children: the strangers who are my
own age.
I wander through Shibuya day after day during those years when I am
11, 12 and 13. I love the feel of it, the vigor and the garish brightness and the
noise; all of such a contrast to my own life.
But I never talk to anyone. I am not frightened of the people, who are so
different from me, but I am shy. I watch the children shouting and playing
around a school, and they are children my age, and they watch me in return;
but we never speak to one another.
One afternoon I am standing on a street corner when a woman near me
reaches out, touches my hair, and says something. I back away, startled,
because my knowledge of the language is poor and I misunderstand her words.
I think she has said, “Kirai des’” meaning that she dislikes me; and I am
embarrassed, and confused wondering what I have done wrong; how I have
disgraced myself.
Then, after a moment, I realize my mistake. She has said, actually,
“Kirei-des’.” She has called me pretty. And I look for her, in the crowd, at least
to smile, perhaps to say thank you if I can overcome my shyness enough to
speak. But she is gone.
I remember this moment – this instant of communication gone awry –
again and again over the years. Perhaps this is where the river starts.
In 1954 and 1955 I am a college freshman, living in a very small
dormitory, actually a converted private home, with a group of perhaps fourteen
other girls. We are very much alike: we wear the same sort of clothes:
cashmere sweaters and plaid wool skirts, knee socks, and loafers. We all
smoke Marlboro cigarettes and we knit – usually argyle socks for our
boyfriends – and play bridge. Sometimes we study; and we get good grades
because we are all the cream of the crop, the valedictorians and class
presidents from our high schools all over the United States.
One of the girls in our dorm is not like the rest of us. She doesn’t wear
our uniform. She wears blue jeans instead of skirts, and she doesn’t curl her
hair or knit or play bridge. She doesn’t date or go to fraternity parties and
dances.
She’s a smart girl, a good student, a pleasant enough person, but she is
different, somehow alien, and that makes us uncomfortable. We react with a
kind of mindless cruelty. We don’t tease or toment her, but we do something
worse; we ignore her. We pretend that she doesn’t exist. In a small house of
fourteen young women, we make one invisible.
Somehow, by shutting her out, we make ourselves feel comfortable,
familiar, safe.
I think of her now and then as the years pass. Those thoughts –
fleeting, but profoundly remorseful – enter the current of the river.
In the summer of 1979, I am sent by a magazine I am working for to an
island off the coast of Maine to write an article about a painter who lives there
alone. I spend a good deal of time with this man, and we talk a lot about color.
It is clear to me that although I am a highly visual person – a person who sees
and appreciates form and composition and color – this man’s capacity for
seeing color goes far beyond mine.
I photograph him while I am there, and I keep a copy of his photograph
for myself because there is something about his face – his eyes – which haunts
me.
Later, I hear that he has become blind.
I think about him – his name is Carl Nelson – from time to time. His
photograph hangs over my desk. I wonder what it was like for him to lose the
colors about which he was so impassioned. Now and then I wish, in a
whimsical way, that he could have somehow magically given me the capacity
to see the way he did.
A little bubble begins, a little spurt, which will trickle into the river.
In 1989 I go to a small village in Germany to attend the wedding of one
of my sons. In an ancient church, he marries his Margret in a ceremony
conducted in a language I do not speak and cannot understand.
But one section of the service is in English. A woman stands in the
balcony of that old stone church and sings the words from the Bible: where you
go, I will go. Your people will be my people.
How small the world has become, I think, looking around the church at
the many people who sit there wishing happiness to my son and his new wife –
wishing it in their own language as I am wishing it in mine. We are all each
other’s people now, I find myself thinking.
Can you feel that this memory, too, is a stream that is now entering the
river?
Another fragment, my father, nearing 90, is in a nursing home. My
brother and I have hung family pictures on the walls of his room. During a
visit, he and I are talking about the people in the pictures. One is my sister,
my parents’ first child, who died young of cancer. My father smiles, looking at
her picture. “That’s your sister,” he says happily. “That’s Helen.”
Then he comments, a little puzzled, but not at all sad, “ I can’t
remember exactly what happened to her.”
We can forget pain, I think. And it is comfortable to do so.
But I also wonder briefly: is it safe to do that, to forget?
That uncertainty pours itself into the river of thought which will become
the book.
1991. I am in an auditorium somewhere. I have spoken at length about
my book, Number the Stars, which has been honored with the 1990 Newbery
Medal. A woman raises her hand. When the turn for her question comes, she
sighs very loudly and says, “Why do we have to tell this Holocaust thing over
and over? Is it really necessary?”
I answer her as well as I can – quoting, in fact, my German daughter-inlaw,
who has said to me, “No one knows better than we Germans that we must
tell this again and again.”
But I think about her question – and my answer – a great deal.
Wouldn’t it, I think, playing Devil’s Advocate to myself, make for a more
comfortable world to forget the Holocaust? And I remember once again how
comfortable, familiar and safe my parents had sought to make my childhood
by shielding me from ELSEWHERE. But I remember, too, that my response
had been to open the gate again and again. My instinct had been a child’s
attempt to see for myself what lay beyond the wall.
The thinking becomes another tributary into the river of thought that
will create The Giver.
Here’s another memory. I am sitting in a booth with my daughter in a
little Beacon Hill pub where she and I often have lunch together. The television
is on in the background, behind the bar, as it always is. She and I are talking.
Suddently I gesture to her. I say, “Shhhh” because I have heard a fragment of
the news and I am startled, anxious, and want to hear the rest. Someone has
walked into a fast-food place with an automatic weapon and randomly killed a
number of people. My daughter stops talking and waits while I listen to the
rest.
Then I relax. I say to her, in a relieved voice, “It’s all right. It was in
Oklahoma.” ( O perhaps it was Alabama. Or Indiana.)
She stares at me in amazement that I have said such a hideous thing.
How comfortable I made myself feel for a moment, by reducing my own
realm of caring to my own familiar neighborhood. How safe I deluded myself
into feeling.
I think about that, and it becomes a torrent that enters the flow of a
river turbulent by now, and clogged with memories and thoughts and ideas that
begin to mesh and intertwine. The river begins to seek a place to spill over.
When Jonas meets The Giver for the first time, and tries to comprehend
what lies before him, he says, in confusion “I thought there was only us. I
thought there was only now.”
In beginning to write The giver I created – as I always do, in every book
– a world that existed only in my imagination – the world of “only us, only now.”
I tried to make Jonas’s world seem familiar, comfortable, and safe, and I tried
to seduce the reader. I seduced myself along the way,. It did feel good, that
world. I got rid of all the things I fear and dislike; all the violence, prejudice,
poverty, and injustice, and I even threw in good manners as a way of life
because I liked the idea of it.
One child has pointed out, in a letter, that the people in Jonas’s world
didn’t even have to do dishes.
It was very, very tempting to leave it at that.
But I’ve never been a writer of fairy tales. And if I’ve learned anything
through that river of memories, it is that we can’t live in a walled world, in an
“only us, only now” world where we are all the same and feel safe. We would
have to sacrifice too much. The richness of color and diversity would disappear
feelings for other humans would no longer be necessary. Choices would be
obsolete.
And besides, I had ridden my bike Elsewhere as a child, and liked it there,
but had never been brave enough to tell anyone about it. So it was time.
A letter that I’ve kept for a very long time is from a child who has read
my book called Anastasia Krupnik. Her letter – she’s a little girl named Paula
from Louisville, Kentucky – says:
“I really like the book you wrote about Anastasia and her family
because it made me laugh every time I read it. I especially liked when it said
she didn’t want to have a baby brother in the house because she had to clean
up after him every time and change his diaper when her mother and father
aren’t home and she doesn’t like to give him a bath and watch him all the time
and put him to sleep every night while her mother goes to work…
Here’s the fascinating thing: Nothing that the child describes actually
happens in the book The child – as we all do – has brought her own life to a
book. She has found a place, a place in the pages of a book, that shares her
own frustration and feelings.
And the same thing is happening – as I hoped it would happen – with
The Giver.
Those of you who hoped that I would stand here tonight and reveal the
“true” ending, the “right” interpretation of the ending, will be disappointed.
There isn’t one. There’s a right one for each of us, and it depends on our own
beliefs, our own hopes.
Let me tell you a few endings which are the “right” endings for a few
children out of the many who have written to me.
From a sixth grader: “I think that when they were traveling they were
traveling in a circle. When they came to “Elsewhere” it was their old
community, but they had accepted the memories and all the feelings that go
along with it…”
From another: “…Jonas was kind of like Jesus because he took the pain
for everyone else in the community so they wouldn’t have to suffer. And, at the
very end of the book, when Jonas and Gabe reached the place that they knew
as Elsewhere, you described Elsewhere as if it were heaven.”
And one more: “A lot of people I know would hate that ending, but not
me. I loved it. Mainly because I got to make the book happy. I decided they
made it. They made it to the past. I decided the past was our world, and the
future was their world. It was parallel worlds.”
Finally, from one seventh grade boy: “I was really surprised that they
just died at the end. That was a bummer. You could of made them stay alive, I
thought.”
Very few find it a bumer. Most of the young readers who have written to
me have perceived the magic of the circular journey. The truth that we go out
and come back, and that what we come back to is changed, and so are we.
Perhaps I have been traveling in a circle too. Things come together and
become complete.
Here is what I’ve come back to:
The daughter who was with me and looked at me in horror the day I fell
victim to thinking we were “only us, only now” (and that what happened in
Oklahoma, or Alabama, or Indiana didn’t matter) was the first person to read
the manuscript of The Giver.
The college classmate who was “different” lives, last I heard, very
happily in New Jersey with another woman who shares her life. I can only
hope that she has forgiven those of us who were young in a more frightened and
less enlightened time.
My son, and Margret, his German wife – the one who reminded me how
important it is to tell our stories again and again, painful though they often are
– now have a little girl who will be the receiver of all of their memories. Their
daughter had crossed the Atlantic three times before she was six months old.
Presumably my granddaughter will never be fearful of Elsewhere.
Carl Nelson, the man who lost colors but not the memory of them, is the
face on the cover of this book. He died in 1989 but left a vibrant legacy of
paintings. One hangs now in my home.
And I am especially happy to stand here tonight, on this platform with
Allen Say because it truly brings my journey full circle. Allen was twelve yers
old when I was. He lived in Shibuya, that alien Elsewhere that I went to as a
child on a bicycle. He was one of the Other, the Different, the dark-eyed
children in blue school uniforms, and I was too timid then to do more than stand
at the edge of their school yard, smile shyly, and wonder what their lives were
like.
Now I can say to Allen what I wish I could have said then: Watashi-no
comodachi des’. Greetings, my friend.
I have been asked whether the Newbery Medal is, actually, an odd sort
of burden in terms of the greater responsibility one feels. Whether one is
paralyzed by it, fearful of being able to live up to the standards it represents.
For me the opposite has been true. I think the 1990 Newbery freed me
to risk failure.
Other people took that risk with me, of course, One was my editor,
Walter Lorraine, who has never to my knowledge been afraid to take a chance.
Walter cares more about what a book has to say than he does about whether
he can turn it into a stuffed animal or a calendar or a movie.
The Newbery Committee was gutsy too. There would have been safer
books. More comfortable books. More familiar books. They took a trip beyond
the realm of sameness, with this one, and I think they should be very p0roud of
that.
And all of you, as well. Let me say something to those of you here who
do such dangerous work.
The man that I named The Giver passed along to the boy knowledge,
history, meories, color, pain, laughter, love, and truth. Every time you place a
book in the hands of a child, you do the same thing.
It is very risky.
But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that
separates him from Elsewhere. It gives him choices. It gives him freedom.
Those are magnificent, wonderfully unsafe things.
I have been greatly honored by you now, two times. It is impossible to
express my gratitude for that. Perhaps the only way, really, is to return to
Boston, to my office, to my desk, and to go back to work in hopes that
whatever I do next will justify the faith in me that this medal represents.
There are other rivers flowing.


__________________
Sweetnpetite

"but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain." Oscar Wilde

 

[sweetnpetite]

A really good answer

How do you get your ideas?
This is the question I am asked more than any other question. Cab drivers ask me, and kids ask me, and my dentist asks me, usually when my mouth is wide open and he has his hands inside it. The problem is that there isn't any easy answer. I wish I could give you the name of a mail-order place where you could send for ideas. But ideas come form your imagination. If you are a writer you are also an observant person. All writers are. And when you observe something, your imagination begins to play. Suppose you see a child crying, in an airport. No big deal. But if you are a writer, you start to think: what if that child is being kidnapped? Or: I wonder if that child is in pain; maybe he has appendicitis, and his parents don't know it. And then you get on your flight, and you never see the crying child again, but the ideas stay there, in your imagination....

http://www.loislowry.com/faq.html

 

[sweetnpetite]

How can I get to be a writer?

Read a lot. I mean really a LOT. And when you're reading, think about how the author did things. How did the author create a character who is interesting? Read the first paragraph of Anastasia Krunik or the first two pages of Gooney Bird Greene and see if you can figure out how I created those two characters. Think about: how did the author create suspense? Read the last sentence, for example, in Chapter 12 of Number the Stars, or the last sentence in Chapter 1 in Gathering Blue. What do those sentences accomplish?

If I become an author, will I get rich?
No. If that is your goal, you should think about becoming an orthodontist.

http://www.loislowry.com/faq.html

 

[SnoopDog]

Come again when you meet Lois Lane. Lol.
No just kidding. I don't know that name. But I can understand the excitement.

Snoopy

 

[sweetnpetite]

She's one of those writers you read around the age of 10 or so, along with Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary.

She writes Anistatia Again! Anastasia Ask Your Analist, ect.(and a whole series about her) She's a girl who's mom is a painter and her dad is an English Professor and they live in Cambrige Mass. until they move to the suburbs. Her parents are really cool and don't treat her like a kid- they are rather bohemian in there childrearing attitude.

She also writes books about her brother Sam.

She wrote "Number the Stars" -havent' read it.

She wrote 'The Giver' the kind of book you read in Junior High if they make you (but if your like me, your glad you did) I never had to read it in school, I found it on the ground when I was an adult and read it. (just found it there on the ground)


http://www.loislowry.com/images/books_ana_answers.jpg
Anastasia Krupnik

 

[sweetnpetite]

some other books by lois lowry

http://www.loislowry.com/images/books_ana_again.jpg

http://www.loislowry.com/images/books_ana_analyst.jpg

http://www.loislowry.com/images/books_ana_address.jpg

http://www.loislowry.com/images/books_terrific.jpg

http://www.loislowry.com/images/books_giver.jpg
Newberry Award Winner

http://www.loislowry.com/number_stars.html
Newberry Award Winner


I post some of the covers, because a lot of times I recognize books more by their covers than their titles- particularly if I haven't read them in over 10 years, lol.

 

[sweetnpetite]

A few more from the bookshelf

http://www.loislowry.com/images/books_messenger.jpg

 

[sweetnpetite]

A few more from the bookshelf

http://www.loislowry.com/number_stars.html
http://www.loislowry.com/images/books_find_strangers.jpg
http://www.loislowry.com/images/books_stay.jpg

http://www.loislowry.com/images/books_gathering.jpg

http://www.loislowry.com/images/new_book__lg.gif

http://www.loislowry.com/images/books_silent_boy.jpg

 

[SnoopDog]

Ok, now I see. Well then tell us about it after you met her.
Have fun,

Snoopy

 

[ketel1king]

hello

Hello There!!

 

[sweetnpetite]

oh hi! I almost didnt see you there!!!

 

[sweetnpetite]

Ok, I saw her today. Too tired right now...

 

[minsue]

Ok, I saw her today. Too tired right now...

ROFL! After all of that, all we get is 'I saw her today'???

- Mindy, highly amused