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Just now I Googled it, and found this description; "As a lasting memorial to Mr, Bosler, his widow and five children erected a handsome public library building ,,, known as "The J, Herman Bosler Memorial Library,' Entirely completed and equipped with furniture and books, it was formally transferred to trustees on Jan, 30,1900, together with an endowment fund of $20,000....The building has a frontage on West High Street of 57 feet and a depth of 88 feet, standing on a lot 63 by 110 feet.
I started writing this speech on a recent Wednesday, and as I sat there staring mindlessly at the computer, trying to think about what to say (what new to say!), I decided to look on Amazon for the current ranking of The Giver.
Writers do this. It's like touching your child's forehead to feel its temperature, sniffing the bottle of milk to determine whether it is fresh, glancing up at the clouds before deciding to take an umbrella. Just a quick assessment of status,
The Giver, on Amazon, on this particular Wednesday, was ranked number 573,
You may not be aware of how astounding that is. Number 573 on Amazon is practically a bestseller. And yet this book was published fourteen years ago.
To put things into perspective, I checked the ranking of The Higher Power of Lucky, this year's Newbery winner. It was number 1,078, (Of course, it has that controversial scrotum in it).
I checked an all-time favorite, Holes, another Newbery book, a well-regarded film. It was number 20,373,
I checked Bridge to Terabithia. Newbery, Currently a very popular movie. Number 23,366,
And finally, knowing for certain that I could find something that would put The Giver into perspective, bring it down a peg, humble it, I looked up To Kill a Mockingbird. It was number 2,220,
Astounding,
I began to try to think about why The Giver has remained so popular, so meaningful to so many people, for so many years ... why this organization has chosen to honor it, and me. And I do have some thoughts about that.
But first I want to talk about what a pleasure it is to be here in the company of librarians.
One of my happiest childhood memories is of going frequently to the public library in the small college town where I lived. It seemed the grandest building in the town, though there were other impressive ones nearby; the buildings of the college itself and the law school. The bank where my grandfather's office was. But it was the library, the J, Herman Bosler Memorial Library, that had captured my heart and in which I spent so many solitary and supremely happy hours.
At home, while my sister played "school" with her dolls, frowning at them and scolding them as she taught them to read and add and multiply and sit still, I played a game that I thought of simply as "library," I arranged my books (and I was lucky to grow up in a home that valued books, and bought books, and gave me books) carefully, I stacked them up, sorted them, checked them out to my dolls and stuffed animals with great solemnity and with those magical thumps that seemed important in that pre-computer era. Thump, Thump, And the book became the property ofthat doll, or bear, or elephant, and I would send it off to a corner of the room with the book propped against its stuffed lap or knees,
I outgrew the dolls, of course, but never outgrew the books, or the library, though I said goodbye to that town, and that library, when I was eleven years old, in 1948, and moved on to others and to others and to others. But I remembered the J, Herman Bosler Memorial Library as being a magnificent building, something on the order of a cathedral, with pillars, and at least a hundred granite steps.
But a few years ago they invited me back to speak at the one hundredth birthday party for that library. It surprised me that the library was actually small. The steps were cement, and there were no more than ten of them.
Just now I Googled it, and found this description; "As a lasting memorial to Mr, Bosler, his widow and five children erected a handsome public library building ,,, known as "The J, Herman Bosler Memorial Library,' Entirely completed and equipped with furniture and books, it was formally transferred to trustees on Jan, 30,1900, together with an endowment fund of $20,000....The building has a frontage on West High Street of 57 feet and a depth of 88 feet, standing on a lot 63 by 110 feet. About 4,400 books are now upon its shelves under the care of the efficient and popular librarian, W, Homer Ames."
It is the trick that memory plays, isn't it? The enormity that we remember comes more from our emotional attachment to things than to actual size. Grandpa's lap-the place I curled so often, as he read Kipling to me-is remembered as soft and comfortable. Could it be that he might have had, actually, bony knees and scratchy tweed trousers?
Could my beloved library, the cathedral of my earliest literate life, have actually had a frontage of just fifty-seven feet?
I also, incidentally, found this as part of the library's history; "The price of a library subscription in 1900 cost $1,00 per year. The rules stated that all persons above the age of twelve years, of cleanly habits and good reputation may use the books in the building,'"
That age rule must have changed, because I was well under twelve (of cleanly habits, usually, though, and I think my reputation was good) when I prowled the stacks of that library so contentedly in the 1940s,
It's probably not surprising that when I sat down to write the book that would be called The Giver, and to create a world that had lost so much of importance ... it was a world that had no books,
My own first book was published when I was forty. My thirty-fourth book has just been published, and I'm seventy now, I've turned them out in somewhat the same way I turned out babies, in 1958, 1959, 1961, and 1962; close together, one after another, and proud of each one of them ... but the best part is to watch them go out into the world, and to see what they become to others.
Last weekend I sat in a large audience and watched a daughter receive a master's degree, I felt proud of her, how hard she had worked, how well she had done. But I never once felt, I made her what she is today.
And I don't feel that way, either, about books I've written, I turn them loose. They're on their own. They take on a life separate from me.
And it's the life of one book that I'm here to talk about,
Not long ago I got an e-mail from a teacher in South Carolina who told me that she teaches in a rural part of the state, a dirt-poor area. During the winter she was reading The Giver aloud to the class, one chapter a day. One day it snowed, A rare occurrence in South Carolina, and schools closed. During the day, when she was at home, her phone rang. She said it was the most troubled, most troublesome, most disruptive boy in her eighth-grade class. We've all known those boys; sullen, disaffected, unresponsive. Yet here he was, on the phone. And he begged her to read the next chapter of The Giver to him.
The teacher told me that she almost wept as she read to him that snowy afternoon, sitting alone in her house and hearing the boy's breath through the phone as he listened. It was the first time the boy had ever become engaged, interested, enthusiastic about anything.
And so I am back to the earlier question. What is it, about this particular book?
What was it to the young Trappist monk who wrote to me once, and told me that in the silence and solitude of his order, he had read The Giver and considered it a sacred text?
Or the privileged high school senior who risked punishment because he insisted on reading the entire book aloud, non-stop, standing on the auditorium stage of his Minneapolis private school, refusing to obey the teachers who ordered him to stop and to return to class?
How about the young woman who-not sure of how copyright law applied-asked my permission to have a page of The Giver tattooed on her left shoulder?
And what made it appeal to a troubled adolescent in the rural South?
Well, just last week I got an e-mail from a college student, a girl who was writing a term paper using The Giver as what she called "contemporary myth," She asked me if I agreed with that assessment, I confessed to her that I didn't know, that I hadn't a clue what she meant by "contemporary myth," but that I was sure her paper would be intriguing and I wished her well.
Then, thinking about it after I had replied to her, I tilted back my chair so that I could reach my bookcase and I pulled out Joseph Campbell, began to skim, and realized it indeed answered the question of what is it about this particular book?
I certainly didn't think in grandiose terms-no thoughts at all about religion or politics or philosophy-when I sat down simply intending to write a story, the story that became The Giver. I had been thinking a great deal about memory because I had been watching my father's diminish and fade at the same time that I watched my mother cling tenaciously-fiercely-to the tiniest memories that went back seventy and eighty years and meant so much to her.
So I thought about what memory means, what it does, how we use it-and of course, what would happen if we let go of it. If we chose to do that,
I sat down to write a story that grappled with those questions, I chose to make the story about a boy.
And without planning or intending it, I recreated the classic hero of all recurrent myth; the figure (and yes, though it is sexist, the mythic hero seems always to be male) who perceives something wrong in the world and who therefore is compelled to undertake a quest.
Picture the boy in South Carolina, I know nothing about him beyond what his teacher told me. He's an eighth grader. He's disruptive, disaffected, disadvantaged. He'll be a drop-out soon.
But I am a very visual person. My mind creates images, I picture him African American, I don't know his ethnicity, but I know where he lives-a place with a largely African American population-and that's how he appears in my mind, I see a lanky black boy with large sneakers, restless legs, bored eyes, forced to sit in a classroom with inadequate resources-this is a poor rural area-a classroom with nothing that seems relevant to him, nothing that holds his interest.
I see him sprawled at his desk, legs in the aisle, I see him yawn and fiddle with a pencil and gaze out the window, or glance at the clock, when the teacher begins to read a story and it is about a boy.
But because he has a mind, and an imagination-because all kids do, all humans do-he begins to see himself in the fictional boy. Something feels familiar. The boy in the story is scared. He's worried about what is going to happen to him. His parents don't seem to care. But the boy, the fictional boy, Jonas, senses that something is wrong in his world.
Well, the boy in the classroom, the one slouched in his desk, is scared, too. His own world sucks. His own parentsassuming he has them in his life-do their best, but are not a source of wisdom or comfort. He hasn't a clue what his own future holds. He suspects it holds nothing.
He begins to listen to the story about the scared, uncertain boy.
Then the boy in the book meets a man.
This is part of the structure of myth, of course. The hero encounters a mentor-often it is someone with magical powers, Jonas, in the book, has this experience. He meets a man who has amazing powers and who is able to give him something intangible, something mysterious, not yet explainable.
The boy in the classroom, listening, maybe less restless, attentive by now, knows in his heart that he is not going to have an opportunity to meet a bearded man who will be his mentor. Maybe there have been people in his past-a Cub Scout leader once, a Little League coach, maybe, who tried-but there had been no connection for him; they tried to make him conform, to follow their rules, and it didn't work for him, and he dropped out and drifted away.
But something is happening that he is unaware of. He has met a teacher who is magically transferring excitement to him, and a sense of wonder.
So we have a boy who is himself a Jonas, He is a mythic hero, a young boy caught in a world that offers him little, that is in many ways a sick society; and through a mentor-a teacher-a Giver-he begins to undertake his own journey, as Jonas does.
There are other stock situations in myth. There is a threshold that the hero must cross in order to enter the unknown,
Jonas gets on a bike and crosses a bridge on his way to Elsewhere; the young boy in South Carolina picks up a telephone on a snowy day.
Myth requires a journey. They both set out.
Myth requires that they encounter obstacles, entertain doubts, that they despair and feel all is lost. We know, those of us who know The Giver, that Jonas experiences all of those things,
We don't know the boy in South Carolina, But we know the rural South, We know our culture. We know what the world offers a semi-educated, disaffected boy like him. And so we know that he, too, is going to experience crushing defeats and terrible despair.
But for now, during two weeks in February, he makes that mythic journey with a fictional character.
There is a moment when Jonas feels like giving up, like giving in;
He got off [the bicycle] and let it drop sideways into the snow. For a moment he thought how easy it would be to drop beside it himself, to let himself and Gabriel slide into the softness of snow, the darkness of night, the warm comfort of sleep.
But the trials that a mythic hero undergoes test him and reveal his true nature. So it is, with Jonas;
He pressed his hands into Gabriel's back and tried to remember sunshine. For a moment it seemed that nothing came to him, that his power was completely gone. Then it flickered suddenly, and he felt tiny tongues of heat begin to creep across and into his frozen feet and legs. He felt his face begin to glow and the tense, cold skin of his arms and hands relax. For a fleeting second he felt that he wanted to keep it for himself, to let himself bathe in sunlight, unburdened by anything or anyone else.
But the moment passed and was followed by an urge, a need, a passionate yearning to share the warmth with the one person left for him to love.
And of course his true nature is courageous and unselfish. He becomes, after passing through the trials, like all mythic heroes, transcendent. Maybe, briefly, to the boy in South Carolina, reaching a destination seems possible,
I think the reason the book remains, after all these years, a bestseller (I began writing this on a Wednesday, Now it is Friday, I just checked Amazon again. Today it is number 474 ... up a hundred notches in two days) is because everywhere-in China and Hungary and Germany and Serbo-Croatia and every one of the twenty-two countries in which this book is published now-readers live in a world that is wounded and needs saving. They want to make that mythic journey with a boy named Jonas, They want to share his passionate yearning and to emerge into a place where there is music.
They want to know it is possible.
I'd like to quote some lines from a poem called "The Makers" by Howard Nemerov, a former poet laureate of the United States, "The Makers" of the title refers to the very first writers, those of ancient times, and in the poem he says this;
They were the ones that in whatever
tongue
Worded the world, that were the
first to say
Star, water, stone, that said the
visible
And made it bring invisibles to view
When a young reader-whatever age-ten or twelve or fourteen-is captured by a book, is enthralled with a plot and in love with a character, he (or she), curled in a chair, or listening to the voice of a teacher, puts himself into that fictional situation, and weighs the choices the fictional character makes, that reader becomes that character for a period of time.
Books for young people have tremendous power over their audience. We're fortunate, in this country, that we have so many wonderful writers for children, so many wonderful librarians, so many wonderful teachers, who understand that power and who use it with wisdom and intelligence.
And all we writers do, really, is, as Nemerov said/say the visible"-the concrete, the details, the things that make a book come to life, that tell the story, that capture the attention, that invite the reader to make a journey. And then, when it works, it does what the poet said; it brings invisibles to view. The invisibles are those abstract, mythic things we care about; integrity, honesty, a sense of history, a hope of future. We try to make them accessible to the young. Interesting to the young. Important to the young,
I look with awe at the list of previous recipients of this award, I'm very honored to be among them.
But you know what makes me feel truly honored, truly successful? Knowing that on a snowy afternoon in an impoverished home in South Carolina, one troubled, angry boy crossed a threshold when he picked up a telephone, called his eighth-grade teacher, and said, with passionate yearning n his voice, "You gotta read to me,"
Thank you.
Copyright American Library Association Fall 2007