Interrupting the trip for sorrow

I am having a wonderful time re-living my time in Tibet, but that is only part of my days these days.

2012 has its own rhythms, joys and sorrows. And one huge sorrow came yesterday with the passing of Ellen Levine.  Ellen was a good friend, a wonderful writer, passionate for justice for the powerless, the least, the lost. She was thoroughly engaged with life and full of joy.  (I will never forget her delight in her snow pants the winter she came to Hamline). The world is a lesser place without her.

We can keep some of Ellen's voice with us by keeping her books alive. Here's a list from her website:

Picture Books

Henry’s Freedom Box 
(which won a Caldecott Honor Award, announced during our Hamline winter residency, 2008. We were all much excited).

I Hate English!

Seababy: A Little Otter Returns Home (March 2012  !!)

Nonfiction

UPClose: Rachel Carson

Darkness Over Denmark: The Danish Resistance and the Rescue of the Jews

Freedom's Children: Young Civil Rights Activists Tell Their Own Stories

A Fence Away From Freedom: Japanese Americans and World War II

If You Traveled on the Underground Railroad

Novels

Catch a Tiger by the Toe

The Journal of Jedediah Barstow

In Trouble

Last fall, while battling lung cancer, Ellen talked about writing a controversial book like In Trouble at the Boston Book Festival.  If you want to read this talk and--almost--hear her voice again, here it is.

Nothing erases loss. It's a  fact. Like a rock. But there are memories to throw up against it--of a life lived with courage, laughter, passion, and honesty.  Thank you, Ellen, for all you gave us, all you taught us.

Start here

I love notebooks and can hardly resist adding another to my collection when I'm in an office supply store. A new notebook is so full of possibility. Maybe this time I'll make the transition from glistening idea to actual story with no loss.

I always start a new writing project with a new notebook and a new pen. Once I have the notebook I often put pictures or mementos on the cover to remind myself that it is not just a generic notebook but it is the physical "hatching place" for whatever is to come.

I'm beginning to think about a new project this month and I've been wondering how others writers start out. What can we learn from each other?

I asked some friends to share their "starts" and will be posting this week about what they have told me. I hope some readers will also be moved to share how you begin a piece of writing, whether it's a poem, a children's story, an essay, a school assignment or a piece of freelance writing.

Nancy Werlin, National Book Award finalist (Rules of Survival) and Edgar Award winner (Killer's Cousin), and, most recently, author of Extraordinary and Impossible, told me:

"I think and think and think, sometimes for years, in the back of my mind while I'm doing other things, and then one day I am ready to sit down and open a file and start writing. It doesn't go smoothly after that -- there are always fits and starts -- but one day, I open a file and write."

This morning, while I was walking and waiting for herons, I was reminded of Nancy's comment and wondered if I have too much of a tendency to pursue stories as if they were runaway rabbits, to chase them into their hole and then drag them out. Perhaps I would do better to be more relaxed about it, to wait patiently, enjoying the sunshine, for the stories to nibble on my toes, as it sounds like Nancy does.

I'm going to try that with this new notebook and new pen.

And speaking of sunshine, here's a wonderful poem by 14th century Iranian poet Hafiz, a gift in my mail today from Ellen Levine.

Even after all this time
the sun never says to the earth,
You owe me.

Look what happens with
a love like that.
It lights up the sky.

Perhaps every beginning starts with love-- some kind of love--love of character, love of story, or as E.B. White, once said: "I just wanted to say I love the world."