on the other side of our bombs

I didn’t want to write anything about 911 because I hate the fact that horror over the deaths of so many innocent people became the rationale for more deaths of more innocent people. I hate it that I’m supposed to feel horrified not because so many people died that day but because the people who died were Americans. I hate it that people acted like it came out of the blue, as if there was no context, and that now I have to explain that I know there was no excuse— there was no excuse, but there was a context. I hate it that people acted as if a tragedy of this magnitude had never happened to anyone else, that suffering was ours alone.
When I saw what happened on 911, I thought: this is what it looks like on the other side of our bombs.
Yesterday I was stopped at the light on 9th Street behind a car with three bumper stickers: an Army bumpersticker, a bumpersticker of a prayer, beginning, Dear Jesus, and a bumpersticker that said, Attack Iraq.
I don’t understand how we can care so much about one group of people, but not another.

Listening to the torture debate

Today I said to my son that it’s surprising someone hasn’t gotten hold of a nuclear bomb yet and blown us all up. I don’t know why I talk like this in front of my children. It’s no wonder they’re full of anxiety.

not a trashy novel

Tracy told me apologetically that she read my first book, and she could hardly put it down. She said she didn't usually read trashy novels.

I beg your pardon.

Well, in the first place, you never have to apologize to a writer for not being able to put her book down.............but is she right? Is my book a trashy novel? When people ask about it, I say it's a story about character and place. It's about families and about what people want or think they want. It's about bigotry and small towns, about desire and love and figuring out what matters, it's about what happens to someone whose desires are at odds with her own self interest, someone whose most authentic act is infidelity.

(My mother, bless her heart, tells people that my publisher made me put the sex in there, so the book would sell.)

I sit on the porch in the hot sun and, instead of feeling closed off, my skin feels like it's an open thing. Like in the night somebody peeled it back so all the nerves inside me are laid open on the skin. I sit like that for I don't know how long. It's like I'm somebody who has no mind anymore to notice the passing of time. It's like all of who I am has got pressed into the body I've got and I'm alive like an animal is alive with just its skin and its legs and its face.

at the beach

Two kindergarten boys were playing with plastic animals: porpoises, whales, little elephants. One of the boys was telling me about the beach. I saw a whale at the beach. I saw a humpback whale. I saw a porpoise at the beach. I saw a dead seal at the beach. The other boy interrupted. I saw a little elephant at the beach.

Leave the kids alone

I was never encouraged to read as a child. I never heard of Caldecutt or Newbery. I never saw a reading list. I read randomly. I read classics and trashy novels. I read plays and books of cartoons. I read science fiction before I knew there was such a thing as genre. I read biographies and history books and (with great confusion) Naked Lunch.
I work now as a librarian in an elementary school. We have reading contests and prizes for whoever reads the most, as if reading has to be rewarded. And we have lists of books recommended for children, as if reading is anybody’s but the reader’s own business.
I think reading is deeply personal. I think whatever happens when someone reads, whatever goes on between the reader and the book, is nobody’s business.
A woman once told me that her daughter only wanted to read Babysitter’s Club books, and she had told the girls’ school not to let her do it anymore. The girl needed something more challenging. She needed something of better quality, her mother thought. Sometimes kids have bad taste and, while it’s natural to give our opinions, or to suggest books they might like, I think basically we have to leave them alone. I thought of my friend’s daughter a few years later when a girl in my school spent the whole year reading only Babysitter Club books. The girl’s father was in jail, her parents in the middle of a divorce, and then one day her uncle had murdered his family. For a while, I made gentle suggestions of other titles she might like, but one day it occurred to me that maybe she needed the calm predictability of The Babysitter’s Club. Maybe she needed to inhabit, if only for a little while, a wholesome world of natural consequences and small, solvable predicaments.
I thought of those girls with their Babysitter Club books after the last election, when I found myself reading only mysteries. Mysteries—stories driven by the pursuit of truth and justice. In mysteries, the good guys almost always win. In mysteries, the world is set straight for a moment.
My humble opinion: Recommend books to children, just as you’d recommend them to a friend, but then get out of the way.

Lydia's Not Poem

Today is the first day of school and, in honor of that, I'm going to publish a poem written by a 4th grader named Lydia. I taught a poetry workshop to her class a few years ago, using Kenneth Koch's lesson plans on teaching poetry to kids. This poem is what he calls a "not poem:"

Not Poem

I am Lydia
I am not a baseball bat
I am not a tuna sandwich
I am not a green candy heart
I am Lydia

I am not an insurance agent
I am not a manufactured house
I am not a magnolia
I am Lydia
I am good at poetry

I am not good at jumping as high as the Grand Canyon
I am not good at talking Japanese
I am not good at flying across the ocean
I am good at poetry.