Is there a book...

Last Sunday's New York Times "By the Book" column featured and interview with Sherman Alexie.

The answer that most interests me today is the one to the following question: What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?

“The Basketball Diaries,” by Jim Carroll. My dad gave it to me for my 15th birthday. He thought it was only about basketball. But it’s a book about heroin addiction, Catholic guilt, teenage sex, soul sickness and basketball. This book, above all others, is the reason I write.

The comment that struck me was, "This book, above all others, is the reason I write."  Made me wonder, made me form a question for myself is there a book that is the reason that I write?

And I think, not one book, but a stack of books, the stack that I read with Sarah and Justin almost every day. We did not have a huge stack, but we looked forward every day to our time with Curious George, Bartholomew Cubbins, The Cow Who Fell in the Canal, or Pierre, who only would say I don't care. Those times made me want to write a story that could be part of someone's good times.

There are other books that keep me writing--the classic Miss Rumphius, by Barbara Cooney always makes me want to write about a character who is so real that she/he will travel with readers for their entire lives. A newer book My Father's Village by Claire Nivola makes me want to look more closely at my own life for the real stories that are there. And No Crystal Stair by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson--at the top of my to-read list--I expect will  reminds me that I can tell those life stories however they demand to be told, as history or as a documentary novel.

In my life right now there might be a story about cleaning out the cupboard under the sink. I'm always reminded of Little Meery in Paul Bunyan. Little Meery was consigned to the cupboard under the sink. Who else might live in such a place? Or there might be a story in the two boys who stopped by our house with their own leaf rakes last night, hoping to earn some cash raking our leaves. They did. I wonder what they did with it. Or maybe a story in the piles of clothes that seem to have taken themselves to our bedroom and just dropped.

Finding the possibilities is easy. Finding the persistence to develop the possibilities is the continuing challenge for this writer. But if the story is strong enough, demanding enough, it brings its own insistence that it be told, and that is the next thing to persistence.

And finally a question: what are the books that inspired you?  To write? To change? To be who you are?

My Father's Village by Claire Nivola: a wonderful story, a wonderful model.

My Father's Village by Claire A. Nivola (Frances Foster Books, 2011) tells the story of the author's visits to the Sardinian village where her father was born. We readers go with her as she and her family "traveled far across the ocean to Italy..." to the "overnight boat [that] took us from the mainland to the island's port, arriving at dawn. From there we rode inland, past the scrub oaks and red trunks of the harvested cork trees, past chalky talc cliffs and expanses blackened by brush fires.
How long it took to get there!"

Once there the author and cousins "flew and settled wherever something was happening,... and something was always happening--close enough to touch." We adventure with the cousins, eat the feasts, even attend the wake of a dead man, and the occasional wedding and its three day feast. Eventually the narrator returns home to New York City. And Claire Nivola ends the story with a question and an invitation to readers. "Everywhere there were so many people! It seemed strange that not one of them knew Orani. But then, what different world, I wondered, what Orani of their own might they have known before they traveled here?"

There are many reasons to love this book. First, it takes us to a new place. Most of us have not been to Sardinia but Nivola's detailed descriptions and wonderful illustrations take us there, make us aware of another culture, where people share food and festivals, joy and sorrow; where kids play and run, eat chocolate and find birds that have fallen out of their nests. We see up close the sameness that exists in a faraway culture. And we perhaps are reminded--in a time when so many are so quick to divide our lives in to "us" and "them"--that we may all be "us."

Another important reason to love this book is for the invitation to write about an "Orani" of our own. We could each write a story about the place our father was born--and if we have students, they could, too. Did we live there? Did we ever get to visit? What did we love about those visits? What was scary?

I grew up in the house where my father was born so there was no travel involved. But there were favorite times--playing with my brothers and sisters in the little nook formed by three (or was it four) cedar trees in our front yard, tipping over the lawn chairs and making them into "houses" for fox and geese; homemade lemon/orange ice cream, cold on the tongue but so sweet and creamy, thanks to those Holstein cows; the little surprises in the Christmas stocking--and the night my brother and I were just about sure we saw a shadow of Santa Claus in the front hall, as he was headed downstairs.

Of course there are some who do not know of their fathers' birthplace. But every child has a favorite place. It is the nature of us and of childhood that some places are special to us--a single tree, a grandparent's kitchen, a rock by a river, a candy shop on a busy street, even a favorite car. Whoever we are, there are stories in that place--secrets, surprises, what we used to be just about sure of, what wants to be told.