I like it when the letters include artwork.

I replied:

Dear Andrew,

Hey, thanks for your typed letter, the terrific drawing, and a self-addressed, stamped envelope. Well played, young man!

I’m glad you liked The Case of the Haunted Scarecrow. It has one of my favorite moments in it, when Mila figures the suspect might have printed his name in the shirt. After all, moms and dads do that for kids all the time when they go to camp. So Jigsaw checks the shirt and says, “We’re looking for a kid named Eddie Bauer.”

For blog readers, here’s the scene where Mila and Jigsaw investigate the mysterious scarecrow . . .

Mila fumbled with the shirt collar. “My father’s a neat freak,” Mila jabbered. “He organizes everything. He even writes my name in the back of all my clothes.”

Mila smiled. “Look,” she said.

I craned my neck to read the label. “We’re looking for a kid named Eddie Bauer.”

“That’s the clothing label!” Mila said. “Read the other name.”

I read the name that was printed on the marker: Buzzy Lennon.

I looked up into the trees. There were hardly any leaves left. The sky was crisp and bright. Halloween was next week, then Thanksgiving, then the frozen days and nights of winter. I turned to the front door of the sad, old, silent house. “Let’s see if the doorbell works,” I said.

The door slowly opened with an eerie squeak. Mrs. Rigby’s small, red-rimmed eyes blinked in the sun.

“Yes, what is it?” she asked.

I got the name of the old lady who lived alone in the house from a song by The Beatles: “Eleanor Rigby.”

I appreciate your idea for a different ending. And you are right, that would have been smart. Too bad that Buzzy was so lazy -– he’d rather cheat than do an honest day’s work.

It was nice hearing from you. Keep on reading those books!

Your friend,

JP

When you are an author, and if you are lucky, kids send you letters. Some are formulaic, an assignment; others go deeper and seem more genuine. And some letters chip away at your heart — and you try to answer the best way you know how.

I won’t share the full letter here, or my reply. But read this . . .

To mix things up, I thought I’d run a “Fan Mail Wednesday” piece on an actual Wednesday. I think it’s good to keep readers off-balance. So, here’s a good one. I only wish I could share with you the name of the letter writer, it’s just one of those perfect names that authors like me love to steal.

I replied:

Dear H____,

Thanks for your wonderful letter, I really enjoyed it. I don’t hear from many students who write in cursive –- I thought it had gone the way of the dinosaurs. These days I sign my books in print, because I assume that most kids can’t even read cursive.

Smart that you picked up on Joey’s eating. There are many characters in the Jigsaw Jones series, 40 books, 250,000 words. I try to make each character complete – an individual. I do that by trying to give each one a few distinct traits. Joey is a little goofy, sweet-natured, and he often takes things too literally, like Amelia Bedelia (as when, in The Case of the Rainy Day Mystery, Jigsaw tells him to “put a tail on Bigs Maloney”). But the real key to Joey is his enthusiasm for food. He eats fast, and usually has a crumbled Oreo in his back pocket.

Art by Jamie Smith from The Case of the Rainy Day Mystery. Sadly, it looks like Scholastic has let this most excellent book go out of print. I dream of  getting the rights back for these neglected books, and republishing them myself. I know I could sell ‘em.

So, hmmm, some people think you are weird. Maybe you are a different, I don’t know. But there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m often bored when I meet super-normal people, you know what I mean? I think it’s our quirks and oddities that make us interesting. And believe me, everyone has a little bit of weirdness inside. We’re human beans, after all; it’s our differences that make the world go round.

Anyway, as we travel through life, we eventually find and attract the right kinds of friends –- the people who like us for who we are. If someone thinks you are weird . . . so what. You don’t have to “not like them,” but I do recommend not paying much attention to that kind of thinking.

Be yourself, H_____. Thanks for your kind, well-written letter. You made me happy, and I think you’re terrific. My best,

JP

I get this question from time to time. I always find it funny, kind of. Well, not really.

I replied, in part:

S_____, I’m glad you liked The Case of Hermie the Missing Hamster. Unfortunately, I am unable to send out free books to everyone who writes and asks for one.

I hope this letter is enough.

My best,

While I do have doubts about my ability as a writing teacher, I have to admit that I must know something, all these years and books under my belt. Mostly though, I really think these students want a moment to shine, and share, and it’s my honor to try to support them in their efforts. I just want to find the good qualities in each shared sample and encourage, encourage, encourage.

At one school, Conrad Weiser Middle School in Robesonia, PA, the day began with a general presentation for grades 5-8 in a large auditorium, filled with somewhere around 650 students. Not at all scary, but . . . you really don’t want to bore 650 middle school students.

And I don’t even juggle.

Oh, and get this: At the 3rd school, Brandywine, the school jazz band played (I think) “Birdland” and (I know) “Rockin’ Robin” while the students filed in. That was a first for me — a warm-up act! Wish I had a photo of those guys, they were excellent, and reminded my of my son, Gavin, who plays guitar in his middle school jazz band.

Don’t tell my kids — especially Gavin — that I show pictures of them to crowds like this, their smiling gobs on ten-foot screens. They would be mortified. In fact, Gavin’s default position these days, when it comes to his father, is mortification and embarrassment. Sigh.

On every trip, you make some friends and then never see them again. So here I am, wearing my current go-to sweater, still a little glassy-eyed from my recent (losing) bout with pneumonia, with a couple of students and librarian Kathie Matthew. Don’t go by his expression, the guy in the left is actually thrilled beyond belief. Okay,  maybe not.

Without Kathie’s enthusiasm and energy, the whole trip would have never happened. So thanks again for a great day, Kathie. God bless librarians, each and every one!

She wrote, in part:

A word of explanation: In an early scene to Before You Go, we meet the main character, Jude, as he rides a bus to Jones Beach for his first day of work. Jude plugs in the ear buds and listens to this song . . .

The song became, for this book, and for me, the song. Somehow a guiding light, a sonic north star, the interior soundtrack of Jude’s heart and spirit. Thank you, Robert Smith and The Cure, awesome song. I can absolutely see my character sitting on that bus, head leaning against the pane, staring at the boats out on the water.

A paragraph from the book:

The bus came and everybody shuffled on board, feet dragging. Jude grabbed a seat toward the back, stuffed in ear buds, found The Cure on his iPod, gazed out the window for the ride south on Wantagh Parkway. Jude had been obsessing over the Cure lately, especially the best tunes off “Disintegration.” As a band, they peaked in early 90’s, but Jude liked them anyway. Music was music, it didn’t matter if a song was made fifty years ago in Liverpool, England, or behind some guy’s woodshed five minutes ago. The good tunes stuck and the rest dropped away. Some days Jude could listen to “Pictures of You” on an endless repeat cycle, losing himself in the interplay of guitar, synthesizer and bass. That the Cure’s songs were often dark, brooding and melancholy only made it all the better.  Jude had played guitar for eight years now, practicing four, five times a week. Guitar was his retreat. It was a door closing, shutting the world out, and a window opening, connecting him to something other, a rift in space through which he escaped for hours at a time. Jude felt, not without reason, that music had saved his life. But hey, music made everything better –- even bus rides to a particular version of sucks called My First Day on the Job.

Comment: Looking at this now, I realize that I’m such a music guy. As a reader, I’m often bored by passages about furniture and Sally Mae’s wardrobe. The parts that, as Elmore Leonard famously described it, readers tended to skip. It just wasn’t important to me. But the music a character listened to? The tunes on his mix-tape? Those are telling details, things I want to know. I feel that way at the gym. I want to tap an ear bud-wearing stranger on the shoulder, ask, “What are you listening to? What sounds are you putting into your skull right now? Who are you?”

“Pictures of You,” lyrics

I’ve been looking so long at these pictures of you
That I almost believe that they’re real

I’ve been living so long with my pictures of you
That I almost believe that the pictures are
All I can feel

Remembering
You standing quiet in the rain
As I ran to your heart to be near
And we kissed as the sky fell in
Holding you close
How I always held close in your fear
Remembering
You running soft through the night
You were bigger and brighter and wider than snow
And screamed at the make-believe
Screamed at the sky
And you finally found all your courage
To let it all go

Remembering
You fallen into my arms
Crying for the death of your heart
You were stone white
So delicate
Lost in the cold
You were always so lost in the dark
Remembering
You how you used to be
Slow drowned
You were angels
So much more than everything
Hold for the last time then slip away quietly
Open my eyes
But I never see anything

If only I’d thought of the right words
I could have held on to your heart
If only I’d thought of the right words
I wouldn’t be breaking apart
All my pictures of you

Looking so long at these pictures of you
But I never hold on to your heart
Looking so long for the words to be true
But always just breaking apart
My pictures of you

There was nothing in the world
That I ever wanted more
Than to feel you deep in my heart
There was nothing in the world
That I ever wanted more
Than to never feel the breaking apart
All my pictures of you

Proof that cats, like mothers, have great taste when it comes to 2012 YA debut novels.

It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion

is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe,

is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.” — Albert Einstein.

It’s a simple quote, really, and I came across it when reading his biography, brilliantly written by Walter Isaacson.

And I kept returning it to my mind when I was writing the closing chapter to Before You Go. The scene takes place on the beach, Jones Beach specifically, a place I know well. It’s a feeling, too, not just a place. Because when you stand at the edge of the world like that, the ocean crashing before you, it’s impossible not to feel like a tiny part of something enormous and beautiful, the power and wonder and vastness of nature. The mystery of God or whatever you want to call it.

And I wanted the book’s endnote to convey some sliver of that. When I look at my notes on the final galleys, I see that I fussed with that passage to the last. Deleted a comma and the word “and,” cut a compound sentence into two short ones. I toyed with gilding the lily on the line, “There was another world across it,” but I suspect I got talked out of that by my editor, Liz. Or, hey, sometimes I have the sense to talk myself out of those things. Understatement, you know — it’s what all the kids are clamoring for.

Understatement and subtlety, that’s where the money is!

This brief passage doesn’t live up to the great Einstein quote. I know that. But the echo is there for me and, I hope, reaches readers in some serpentine way. Just the sense of that word, mystery. The ocean gives that to me, and to many other people I know. A sense of peace, and calm, and belonging to some greater thing.

So two teenagers walk on the beach, a broken-up couple heading to the shore:

Becka led the way through the dark, down the long West End beach toward the ocean. Jude smelled the briny air, tasted seaweed on his tongue before the ocean’s hum had even reached his ears. His vision limited to shades of gray and black, Jude sensed something in the distance that couldn’t be seen, something vast and mysterious called the Atlantic. There was another world across from it. He reached out for Becka’s hand. They walked barefoot and together to land’s end.

And again, a few pages later, with Jude alone, I reached for it again . . .

He didn’t know what would happen with Becka. Maybe that’s why he needed to be alone on the beach, to watch the sunrise, to be okay with himself, despite everything. Sometimes life seemed impossibly hard, full of car wrecks and souls that shined like stars in yellow dresses. So much heartbreak and undertow. Jude bent down, picked up a smooth white stone, measured its heft in his hand. And he reached back to cast that rock as far as he could.

Just to see the splash.

I originally posted this in October, 2008. It’s nice to come across old writing and think, okay, not terrible. I still agree with myself.

—-

“When I am writing, I think of myself as a writer. But when I am illustrating, I think of myself as an illustrator. I think, though, that I try to create situations with my writing that will be fun to illustrate. The writer in me tries to please the illustrator.” — Bernard Waber.

Bernard Waber floats just under the top shelf of all-time great children’s authors and illustrators — you don’t hear his name much these days, when people list influences — but I suspect he’s under-appreciated. Certainly he’s written some great books, most notably Ira Sleeps Over and The House on East Eighty-Eighth Street., the first of many books starring Lyle the Crocodile. (Waber also has a knack for titles: A Lion Named Shirley Williamson is one of my favorites.)

I interviewed Bernard Waber in the early 1990’s. We spoke again a couple of years after that. I had hoped he could contribute to a book project, but we got sidelined when my son, Nicholas, was diagnosed with leukemia at age twenty-six months. Work just stopped for a while. Bernard understood, of course, and sent Nick a stuffed crocodile, some books, and a lovely handwritten note.

You don’t forget things like that.

So, yes, there’s bias here, an affection that goes beyond books. When I spoke with Bernard Waber more than 15 years ago — and I’m happy to report he is still going strong at age 84 [edit: 87 now!] — his intelligence shined through. He spoke about his craft with clarity and immodesty, as clear and refreshing as cool water. An innate goodness courses through his books. And his stories, no matter how humorous — how sly, dry, and understated — often contain real sensitivity. He writes from the heart.

“The nice thing about humor,” Waber told me, “is that after you have an idea that you think is humorous, there is always another side that’s sad and complicated. Those are the things you discover after you start writing.”

Ira Sleeps Over finds Waber at his best, capturing the inner angst of a childhood dilemma: the first sleepover. Ira is invited to sleep at his friend Reggie’s house — but he has never slept without Tah Tah, his Teddy Bear. Can Ira risk the embarrassment? With staccato dialogue, Waber deftly explores Ira’s confusing, conflcting emotions. In addition, the dynamic with the older sister rings so true. Because somehow Waberknows. He remembers.

His 2002 book, Courage, in which various characters encounter the need for bravery, was inspired in part by 9/11, though he primarily drew upon childhood memories of the Great Depression. I love the cover:

Waber told Becky Rodia, of Teaching K-8 magazine, “Courage is the summoning of core strengths, faith, and idealism in confrontation with life’s challenges. My parents’ bracing themselves against all odds during the Great Depression taught me valuable lessons in this regard. However, because we are humans with frailties, courage can also mean asking for help and support in the face of overwhelming circumstances.”

When I think of Bernard Waber, I think of someone who showed us what a picture book can achieve. Laughter, childlike appeal, and adult insight. For that, and for more personal reasons, I offer this tribute. I don’t know who handles these things, but I hereby nominate Bernard Waber for a lifetime achievement award for his contributions to children’s literature.

He is one of the all-time greats.

Note: If you enjoyed this appreciation — the fourth in a series — just click the links for thoughts on other literary lions: William Steig, Arnold Lobel, and Raymond Chandler.

NOTE: I originally posted this back in August, 2008 — before I knew how to insert photos.

——–

I love baseball. It’s kind of ridiculous, I know. But it’s not like I had a choice.

As the youngest of seven children, I remember lying sprawled on the tiles of our playroom floor, the television turned to a ballgame, my mother moving from the washing machine to the dryer, bending, lifting, hauling, then over to the ironing board, then back, again and again.

At one point in her life, before I came along, before preschool was in vogue – this was the 1950s, deep in the post-war suburban dream – my mother had five children below the age of seven. It kept her busy. She was busy still in the 1960s, back when I was a pup.

So there she was, that white-haired mother of mine, rooting for her “Metsies.” I learned their names – Cleon Jones, Tom Terrific, Cool Koos and Eddie Kranepool. My mother, a good Irishwoman, showed a decided preference for Wayne “Red” Garrett, the young third baseman who was an average player on his best days, but handsome in that freckled, honest, Irish way. (It was only in later years, as baseball changed, when her crushes shifted to undersized Spanish-speaking shortstops like “little” Jose Oquendo and Raphael Santana.)

Before my mom went Latino, she always

favored the Irish boys.

I also learned the names of the players on the other side, those Mets-killers who broke our hearts. Their names were Shannon and Perez, Clemente and McCovey, Banks and Aaron.

Today I still repeat my mother’s line, inherited and ingrained, whenever a tough batter steps to the plate: “Uh-oh, he’s trouble.”

In my heart, my mother is linked to the New York Mets, and there are times when I don’t know if my love for one is a confusion for the other; or if, in my affection for the Mets, I am only expressing that childlike love I once carried – and still carry – for my mother, the soft lap I once rested my head upon, her hand in my hair. There she is at the end of the couch, a glass of crushed ice on the table, from which she constantly bites and chews. And the game is on the screen, the announcers’ voices in my ears. I am content, I am at home: the game is on and I’m with my mom.

She taught me how to catch, my mother, how to play. That wasn’t Dad’s department. Blithely indifferent, or just otherwise occupied, he didn’t care about sports. We never played catch, or hardly ever. That’s okay, because Mom did. And I liked Mom, plenty. She had a good arm and soft hands.

My mother taught me how to catch and throw.

But I crushed her at ping pong. No mercy.

I remember as a Little Leaguer asking, “Mom, am I graceful?”

She liked grace, my mother, the smoothness that certain outfielders had when they drifted back to the warning track, glove stretched out, eyes in the clouds, finally cradling that ball to the dull, soft slap of leather.

“Yes,” she’d answer. “Very graceful.”

And today, like her, like then, I still snap off the television in despair when the Mets play poorly. “I can’t watch anymore!” we’ll both exclaim across the years and miles, attached by an invisible thread.

Ten minutes later, both of us will again reach for the clicker, filled with the unquenchable hope that is at the heart of every game.

Now I can see that same sweet dynamic in my own children, particularly the two boys. They follow the game, just as they once obsessed over dinosaurs and super heroes, books and guitars. Now it’s baseball. All mixed up and confused with their love for me, I know.

After all, I should, I helped weave the blanket of baseball that wraps around us.

Sometimes I even hear them say it, when certain sluggers step to the plate, Chipper Jones perhaps, or the redoubtable Albert Pujols:

“Uh-oh, he’s trouble.”

By the late 60’s, my mother most feared

RBI-men Mike Shannon and Tony Perez.

But Mom would agree: this guy broke the hearts

of more Mets fans than any other player.