Alison McGhee

So Many Days

Posted on by alisonmcghee

so-many-days-coverA while ago, years probably, the way things are blurring together, someone gave you an idea for a picture book.

“Doorways,” was the idea, which was passed along to you in a three-degrees-of-separation kind of way.

That’s the kind of idea you like. A better word for it would probably be “challenge.” One word, nothing too specific, bedeviling in its abstraction.

Doorways. Look at it long enough and it looks weird, dour even, maybe because of that beginning DOOR.

You picture some of the doorways you’ve known in your life, the literal ones: the many-paned one that led from the kitchen to the dining/living room in the house you grew up in, the door that was never closed because the house was “heated” from the woodstove in the kitchen.

The small door that led to the tiny triangular bathroom in your first one-room apartment, the door that people who didn’t know you assumed led to the rest of the apartment,  the “real” apartment.

The doorless doorway of your friend’s childhood bedroom.

The doorway of your youngest child’s room, hung with beads.

The chained door that you’ve thrown yourself against more than once.

The door that you tried and tried to open, only to come away with the knob in your hand.

These are a few of the doors you’ve known. Passages from one place to another, doorways that you step through. Now you look down at your feet, those long feet that have walked you from one place to another all your life, some you wanted to go to, others that you didn’t but had no choice.

How do you write a picture book about doorways? What can you say? What does it even mean? Think of a song. Make up a little song. Make up the kind of song you used to make up when your children were babies.

“So many doors in all your days

So much to wonder about –

Who will you be and where will you go?

And how will you know?”

You didn’t think much about who you would be and where you would go, way back when. You wanted to go everywhere, and you were young, and you went far, and often alone.

The age you are now seemed unimaginable when you were young, but you don’t feel much different. You’re more patient now, not by nature but by necessity. You’ve let go of some of the things you wanted so fiercely, not by nature but by necessity.

You’ve gone places you longed to go – children and books and friends and loves – you’re lucky. You’ve gone places you never wanted to go, never would have chosen to go – funerals and heartbreak, loss that felt too painful to bear – you’re human. To be human is to love what is mortal.

How do you go from one place in life to another when you don’t know what’s coming? How do you keep going? How can you fit a lifetime of wonder and longing and heartbreak and love into 32 pages?

Can you?

You keep trying. You think of your own children. You don’t want them to hurt, to go through those sudden terrifying doorways that they, being human, will someday have to go through. Will they know that you are watching over them?

You imagine a bird, a kite, earth and sun, the unimaginable depths of that dark ocean. You keep returning to that refrain: How will you know? Sometimes you won’t, is the answer that comes back.

So many doors in all your days

So much to wonder about

Who will you be and where will you go?

And how will you know?

You think of your children again. Please, let them know that you will always be watching over them, no matter where you are, where you have gone.

You are loved more than you know.

And finally it’s a book.  “So Many Days,” illustrated by the quietly brilliant Taeeun Yoo, edited by the wonderful Caitlyn Dlouhy, due out next week from Atheneum. Up top there is the cover.

Now that the old man is gone, she thinks about him much of the time.

Posted on by alisonmcghee

12_slides_0541There are several stop signs in the tiny foothills-of-the-Adirondack-Mountains town (Welcome to the Hamlet of Holland Patent, pop. 300 – don’t you love the word “hamlet”?), but no stop light. Take Route 365 on  your way north or south or east or west and you’ll drive right through it.

You probably won’t stop unless you need gas or unless you’re hungry – there’s one small restaurant, where the portions are upstate New York large, which is something that I personally appreciate.

Small expensive portions that look like pretty little sculptures on a large plate make me  anxious and tense. They make me worry, wondering if I’ll have enough food. Having enough food is important to me. Will I have to ask for another basket of bread and extra butter, just so that I can leave the table full?

I’ll take a diner anytime.

If you’re eleven years old, and walking from the middle school to your 4-H club meeting, held at the Fire Hall – which is a big barnlike place housing the volunteer fire department, a meeting room and an industrial-size kitchen – you can take a shortcut behind a few houses and come upon the Fire Hall the back way.

Wait until the bell rings for the last class of that middle school day. Gather up your books – this is before the days of backpacks or book bags, and long after the days of straps that held them all together – and clutch them to your chest.

What are you wearing? A smocked blue dress. Keds.

Your books are clutched to your chest and you walk the three blocks from school to the Fire Hall to your meeting, which begins right after school, after all the girls gather. You don’t much like 4-H. You don’t much like clubs of any kind, nor will you ever, as it turns out, but you go to 4-H because that’s what you do, and your parents haven’t yet given you permission to quit.

It’s fall. Back then you loved fall because winter didn’t yet fill you with such dread. The maples are on fire and their leaves crunch under your Keds. You are walking alone under a September blue sky, that late September almost-slate blue.

There is no color like it in all the world. There are no leaves like these on-fire leaves in all the world. These books that you hold to your chest are the only books you will ever need, and this day is the one day, and that sky is without end, without boundaries to hold you in.

Your heart begins to beat outside your body, in rhythm with a bigger beat, a beat so big that it’s far beyond you. You can only be filled with it, and with each step – behind the white house, through the alley, there it is, there’s the Fire Hall – you grow more powerful.

This is my life, you think, there is no end to what I can do with it.

You are walking above the cracked sidewalk now, above the weeds growing through the cracks, you are walking without knowing you’re walking, and the feeling pulsing through you is a feeling you will feel a few more times in your life, but this time, this moment, is the one you will come back to all your life when you hear the word joy, the word power, the word infinite, the word universe.

You are eleven years old.

Later in your life you will think of eleven as the magic age of girls. One day you will sit down to write a novel about an old man, an old man who is walking away from you through snowy pine woods, in far upstate New York, holding a candle lantern in each hand, lighting up the woods for the cross-country skiers.

As you begin to set this image down on paper, a girl will appear in your mind, bent over a school desk, scribbling  furiously on a yellow pad of lined paper. She will not look at you. Long messy hair will obscure her face. She will be angry, and smart, and in her anger and her smartness there will be great power.

What she is scribbling down on that yellow pad of paper is the book you want to write. She will write it for you. Early on, she will write these lines:

Let me tell you that a girl of eleven is capable of far more than is dreamt of in most universes. To the casual passerby a girl like me is just a girl. But a girl of eleven is more than the sum of her age. Although it is not often stated, she is already living in her twelfth year; she  has entered into the future.

She is eleven years old, that girl. The book will become a  novel called Shadow Baby, published by the wonderful Shaye Areheart of Shaye Areheart Books. To this day it feels to you as if that girl, Clara, wrote it. You wish you knew her. You wish you could be her, walking with such purpose down the streets of that little town.

* * *

Shadow Baby has just been re-released in a new edition published by Three Rivers Press. Here’s a teeny photo of the new edition, teeny because I’m a photo idiot and have no idea how to make it bigger.

shadow-baby-three-rivers-edition-cover4

I always saw the cover photo as a girl in a long coat, her arms stretched around a tree from behind. Others have seen it as a pregnant woman, holding her belly. As Clara would say, “Who’s to say? Who’s to know?”

Ever wish you could fly?

Posted on by alisonmcghee

only-a-witch-can-fly-coverAll my life I’ve wanted to fly. On the tops of mountains I lean forward with the urge to jump, and the same with tall bridges, and the roofs of tall buildings.

I don’t want to die. No no no, I don’t want to die.

But I want to fly. How I want to fly.

My best dreams are dreams of flying, ones in which I’m flying low through a valley, drifting on the  wind like a hawk or an eagle, and then suddenly my arm-wings are pumping and I’m swooping up and up and up and the mountain is rushing toward me and I’m pumping harder and harder and then suddenly I’m up, I’m over, I’m high in the sky and the mountain is far below me, and the valleys and rivers are spread like a map on the surface of the earth, and I’m gliding on the invisible wind toward the far horizon, where the river runs to the sea.

That’s my favorite dream, right there. Sometimes I make a wish before I go to bed that I will dream that dream, but so far, that wish hasn’t come true. The dream of flying comes when it will, and it will not be willed.

The closest I’ve ever come to my arms as wings and my body drifting weightless on the wind was the time I went up into the sky in an ultra-light. Or maybe it wasn’t an ultra-light – does an ultra-light have an engine?

Because this tiny little wind-plane did have an engine, not that it mattered much except to get the pilot and me up into the sky and then down again. Once we were up there, it was a different story.

“Should I turn the engine off?” the pilot said to me.

This man was someone I didn’t know. I was in the deep South, driving on a rural road, and I saw a sign that said Ultra-light rides, $30. I was very poor back then, and $30 was a lot of money, but I looked at the sign and I thought about flying, and I forked over my dinner money for the week to this man who came walking through the field when he saw my little red car stop by the sign.

Should he turn off the engine? Why would he turn off the engine? Wasn’t the engine the thing that was keeping us afloat, up here in the almost-soundless sky? If he turned off the engine, wouldn’t we go arrowing toward the ground? Wouldn’t I die?

“Okay,” I said.

And he turned off the  engine. And then  it was soundless, high up there, drifting without words in the sky. I looked out the window – the tiny plane was all window – down at the fields and mountains and creeks and valleys of that land where I was a stranger.

He didn’t say anything. He knew how I felt.

We drifted up there a long time, far longer, I’m guessing, than my dinner-money-for-the-week had bought me.

And many years later I wrote this book, Only a Witch Can Fly, about a little girl who dreams of flying. I wish you could see the pictures. They’re by an artist named Taeeun Yoo – gorgeous, haunting woodcut illustrations.

Our book looks like a Halloween-ish book because it’s about a witch, so if you’re a Halloween fan you might like it.

But if you’re a girl, or a not-girl, who wants to be up there among the clouds and the stars, looking far far down – leaving it all behind, if only for a little while – then you’re the one I wrote it for.