The Spiritual in Our Work (for the picturebook writers and everybody else, too)

Human hunger for resonant meaning

photo from amazon.ca

Years ago I bought an old library copy of a picturebook called Frank and Zelda. We’d borrowed it many times, and my boys loved it in the way children do: we read it hundreds of times, and it was often the requested read when they were feeling ill (reserved for only the most favourite books).

Later I bought a second copy when the book was re-titled and re-issued as Pizza For Breakfast. I would share it with the classes I was teaching as an example of a children’s book with no child characters in it. The main characters are an old couple, along with an ageless person of indeterminate magic.

Other than the obvious draw of “pizza,” I was always left a bit awed by how much my boys loved that book: the theme of the book was very “adult.” Or was it?

It’s a story of having wishes answered and then grow out of control, with a final act of wishing the wishes had never taken place. That’s an old story-line; it’s been done many times. But in the closing image Zelda and Frank are at the beach, having given up their enormous pizza restaurant, and they have instead a wee pizza caravan with no customers and they’re enjoying the sun in their lounge chairs. The closing lines are about their being happy: “And this time they knew it.”

A story of acceptance, gratitude, contentment.

Resonant—and ‘that’ face

Years later, that story kept coming to me through my months of caregiving, and when I wrote my memoir of that time, I wanted to include the closing lines. By then the book was out-of-print, and I had to write directly to writer/illustrator Maryann Kovalski to ask her permission to quote from her story, to which she generously said “yes.”

If you look up various reviews, they say it’s a story about “be careful what you wish for.” But it’s more than that ‘lesson.’ It’s one of a handful of picturebooks that have stayed with my boys for years and now as adults they’ll pick it up if they see it on top of one of my piles, and a particular look will come over their faces. “I remember this one.” That’s a look and words that writers yearn to know through their work.

Going deeper

There are a number of books about the commonalities in world religions and faiths, looking at shared qualities of spirituality. As part of a course in comparative religions that I’m reading Essential Spirituality: The Seven Central Practices to Awaken Heart and Mind, by Roger Walsh. Whether theistic faith or non-theistic, the book speaks to cultivating qualities of kindness, love, peace, joy, vision, wisdom, and generosity.

Consider the list, slowly.

Almost everything on that list is included in Pizza For Breakfast, with “peace” foremost. In our rushed and rather mad contemporary world, might it be that even the youngest among us long for peace, and recognize when they feel it, when they know it, even if they don’t—or can’t—yet put it into words? The memories created before we are verbal are most power-filled things; we know this from the trauma that some children endure. So why would it not hold for the positives, too?

This is the stuff we are hungry for, from the earliest age. Surely we enter this world wanting this as our milk. And having to settle for what we get.

What we get too often are lessons about “how to be” in the world. The rules. Many “good stories” are about the “rules” of how to be. Maybe it’s a quick salve; no one has the real time to grow the deep layers of being human. So a rule book seems to be the quickest path to an organized society, and there’s no better place than to start with the children.

But if the children aren’t filled with wonder and awe—if they don’t have that look on their face when we open a book with them—it’s only another rule book.

Take your time

Writing a picturebook can take a shockingly long time. To dig into those layers, to gestate and mull, to develop the gentle points-of-turn, to poke at that so-significant closing line, takes thought and play and work, often months, even years. Each draft needs to sit untouched for some weeks, before being worked again, and then with a light hand.

Sometimes between drafts, I’ll read some nonfiction work. Then process and scribble in my process journal. At the moment, for the PB I’m currently working on, I’m reading a book that looks at our shadows; NONE of that book will go in any direct way into the work (do I need to say that?) And I doubt I’ll return quickly to the manuscript after such a read. But I’ll think further, trusting that whatever I need to come will come.

And I’ll add one line, maybe two. Or maybe cut half a dozen lines to take out something. Sometimes the “growing” of a story is to carve away, to see more clearly. A picturebook is a work of the finest construction. And I apply all I know about writing these challenging works to everything else I write.

That “trust” thing

This is a tough piece. I’ve written long enough to know that eventually—eventually—I find an answer to the pieces I’m working on, to the question in my mind. Even if I set aside a piece and work on later. Even if I abandon a piece because “the” answer doesn’t come. (Note the “an” answer.) If the answer… that’s a terrible word choice. It’s not really an “answer.” Maybe I should call it the “solution” or simply “the thing that makes sense at that point…”

If that “thing” is important enough, at some point it does show up, and it may not be for the original story that birthed the question, but for another, in which case I move on to the next story (some stories are for practice, or to raise questions, and nothing more); this is how the writing life works over years.

But we do need to trust that if we keep the story in mind, the “thing” will arise. It’s the combination of the trust and the keeping in mind. Letting our hearts and minds “sit with” the question.

There’s a second piece to “trust,” too. And that is the trust that the reader will in some way absorb the work.

I took a look at both Goodreads and amazon reviews of Pizza for Breakfast. The Goodreads reviews were rather horrible for the most part, citing the “lesson” of the story; obviously these readers were not feeling what my sons experienced.

A good story is absorbed more than it is read. I recall reading an interview with E.L. Konigsburg, in which she spoke to the layered quality of her novels for young people, and her understanding that they might not understand fully all they read; they might come back to re-read. They’ll “get” what they need at the time, and more as time passes. They will also take in more than they can articulate. I wish I could find the interview and her words; I’m working from memory here! But her thoughts that, as writers, we must include the layers, and not second-guess the reading experience for the young (or old!)

What we value

Ultimately our stories, our work, comes from us, from the depths of who we are, from our values—yes, our spirituality, however you define that. Take time to nurture your self; this self emerges in our work in ways we cannot force or manufacture on the spot. Or hide. If you need to take time from writing to read, to travel, to spend time with that ageing aunt, or to train the new puppy, do that. We need to do this, for all the “rule” reasons, for all the resonant- meaning reasons, for your writer-self, and for you.

Go for a walk and ponder this.

And then