40,000 Push Pins (Or: My Friend, Lynn)

Lynn Thomsen (visual arts teacher): I’ve changed my mind about the project I want to do this year.
Me (program director): Okay, no problem. What do you need?
Lynn: 40,000 push pins.
Me: 40,000 push pins? Uh, sure.

The program is the Prelude Academy, a week-long summer arts workshop for gifted high school writers, dancers, vocalists, musicians, and visual artists who participated in the Indianapolis Children’s Museum Prelude Awards during the school year.

Monday. A dozen or so visual arts students gather in a makeshift studio at the Children’s Museum. They are eager, a little full of themselves, ready to show off their talents. There’s an overhead projector in the room, three big sheets of foam core (approximately 7’x8” each), drawing materials, dozens of art books stacked on a table, many open to colorful prints…and a bunch of cardboard boxes. Lynn opens the flaps of one, tips it forward so the kids can see the contents. Lynn says, “We’ve got 40,000 push pins here—red, blue, green, yellow, and white. What should we paint with them?”

Mutiny ensues. “Push pins! Are you kidding? This is like kindergarten!” one kid says.
“We want to paint,” another says. “With paint,” says a third.

“You already know how to do that,” Lynn says.

Grudgingly, muttering, they leaf through books looking for a work of art to replicate with the push pins. Using the overhead projector, Lynn casts the image of each one on the white wall for their consideration.

By noon they’re all in agreement on one thing: they’re not doing anything abstract. No way. Too easy. By mid-afternoon they decide it’s Botticelli’s “Venus on a Half Shell” they want to make.

Writing this, I have the impulse to call Lynn and ask, “Was it Monday afternoon that they decided to put her on a push pin instead of on the half shell, or did that idea come later, in process? Deciding to do that was the moment they totally bought into the project, though… wasn’t it?

But I can’t call Lynn. She died in January. She had a cold, it didn’t get better, and in what doctors could only describe as a perfect storm of genetic disaster, her organs began to shut down and in less than two weeks she was gone. I still can’t get my head around this. I don't think I ever will.

But the push pins.

Lynn cast the image of Venus on the foam core and the kids sketched her form onto it. They divided up in teams—head, torso, legs (and push pin)—and set to work. The rest of the week looked like this:

Kids bent over the foam core they’d placed on big cafeteria tables. Push pins everywhere, blown up prints of Botticelli’s "Venus" on every surface, sketches of her various body parts. Lynn roaming arpimd, assessing progress, gathering the group to give brilliant, impromptu lectures on, say, color theory or proportion or capturing the exact curve of Venus’s breast.

Sometimes they all stood on chairs to get a different perspective of their work, or taped the three sections together and propped the 8'x20' piece against the wall to see the full effect. There was music, there was singing—even a little dancing, to the rhythm of putting the push pins in their right places. And laughter. Lots and lots of laughter. They also argued sometimes. Panicked: how could they possibly get her finished in a week? They nursed sore, blistered fingers. The clutter of drawings, CD’s, books, art supplies, snacks, coke cans, bottled water, and various totems grew around them in mythic proportion.

Friday, Voila!

They put Venus together and hoisted her on stage to be the backdrop for that evening's performance—amazed at what they’d accomplished. And there was Lynn, helping them, smiling. She’d known from the start the push pin project would be wonderful, though she hadn’t known at all what it would turn out to be. I’ve never known another person whose vision allowed her to remain completely open to possibility in her own work and the work she did with students.

“You were made to set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment,” the writer Annie Dillard said. She might have been writing it about my friend. Lynn was astonished by everything, and spent her whole life spinning her astonishment into marvelous forms, imprinting herself on the world around her. Art and life were the same thing to her.

Lynn’s astonishment at being alive shimmers in her paintings: luminous plowed fields, trees mirrored in summer-calm lakes—the light in them as real as the light pouring in through the huge windows in her loft studio.

You can see the fruits of it in the lives of hundreds of students whom she loved and taught, and who adored her, instinctively understanding that she was not only teaching art, but teaching them how to live. Her countless friends knew it when, again and again, she directed our attention to some small thing that made the world crack open in a way we’d never have imagined and, in doing so, lightened our heavy hearts. Lynn’s time in the world she loved was far too short. But the light she made wherever she went will live among us always.

When remember again (and again and again) that she is gone—and get that awful swirly black feeling inside: how can this be?—I make myself think of her in that makeshift classroom, working among those high school artists, completely engaged in their work together, “Venus on a Push Pin” coming to life beneath their blistered fingers.

Still, I miss her so much.

Going Back to Kindergarten

When I was in kindergarten, we made up stories and our teacher, Miss Hoadley, typed them up and made a book of them. Each of us got a copy. We got to choose the color of construction paper we wanted for the cover (light green for me) and then decorate it. I don’t remember what my story was about, but I absolutely remember the book itself, the particular smell of the mimeographed pages, and what it felt to look at the block of purple print with my name under it, “Barbara White,” and to know that the words I couldn’t read yet were mine. I remember thinking, I want to do this again!

So it was a special pleasure to visit my grandson Jake’s class at the Bridgeford Kindergarten to talk about writing and to celebrate the imminent release of the books they wrote with the help of their teacher, Miss Melissa.

I talked about my books a little bit, especially Everything You Want, because they liked the idea of winning all that money and lots of ideas about how they’d spend it if they won. Also because they loved the goose on the cover…particularly, the goose’s butt on the back flap.

The best part was the creative thinking exercises we did together, though. I brought a box of stuff and pulled two things out at a time. A ceramic house and a pine cone. An unrecognizable plastic action figure and a “fly’s eye,” that multiplies the world when you look into it. With each pair, we played, What if?

Their ideas were endless. They waved their hands. “Jake’s Grandma,” they said. “Jake’s Grandma! What if….”

…there were tiny people living inside the house? What if the house was on a block of regular houses? What if the people were so small they could live inside the pinecone? What if the pinecone fell on the house and all the little people were smushed. What if it was a tree in theiry yard? What if a regular sized person became friends with a tiny person and carried him around on his hand?

What if the action figure was Cat Woman? (She had pointy ears and cat-like face.) What if her super-power was being able to see a million things at once? What if she could make what she saw? Like a million pizzas! But what if the pizzas were tiny, for the tiny people?

After that, we talked about how words were like seeds that could grow pictures. The word “dog,” for example. How many different pictures could that make? Dalmation, poodle (large or small, and what color?), beagle, Chihuahua. “One of those hot dog dogs,” somebody said.

What about “a perfect day?” What’s perfect, anyway? Somebody might think of a summer day with blue skies and sunshine. Somebody else might like rain or snow. We “what-iffed” a summer day. Blue skies, they said. White clouds like marshmallows. Sun that felt warm on your skin. Green grass, cool and tickly. Butterflies landing on flowers. Birds chirping, the pst-pst of of a sprinkler in someone’s yard.

Last, we went on an imaginary journey. They sat still (kindergartners!), closed their eyes and I led them with words through their bedroom windows into a world where the trees were lollipops and a jelly bean path led them to a house made of candy. Afterwards, they told the stories of their imagined worlds.

Yesterday, Jake brought me the story they wrote after I left (transcribed by Miss Melissa) and the fabulous pictures they made for me, showing the worlds they imagined on their journey—and in some cases, descriptions of those worlds. They were all wonderful. I will keep them forever! Here are just a few:

Jake’s has a lady with her arms out, a piano, a cupboard, and a ceiling fan made of lollipops: “thas a choclat curd cawbd it has a chocola curd pano”

Ella had a lady in her story, too: “To Jake’s Gramc from Ella that was a lito girl and she fawd a house thar was a lade picing a plat the lito girl said can haw sum cande”

Elly’s world is all lollipops: “thar’s is LoLy PoP’s! and thar is a tree and the tree is made out of LoLy PoP’s! and the hous, is made out of the LoLy PoP’s and thar is a LoLy PoP laty.”

Mya’s has a block of blue sky, a yellow sun, a little girl standing on a path made of candy: i wint in a house made out of candy i said that house is yummy”

Will, not a candy-lover, made a mostly green house: “it is mede aut of spinach,” he wrote.

Annelise made a lollipop tree and a cookie house: “to jaks grama the huos is made of chocit chip kooes and the rof is mad of clrbings

And here’s the story they wrote with Miss Melissa. But first, can I just say, they totally got the “show, don’t tell” thing that sometimes takes college students a whole semester to understand, if they get it at all?

Once upon a time two kids named Pete and Frannie went for a walk in the forest. Suddenly, they saw a bear. They ran as fast as they could to a house. The house was covered with candy. The roof was made of chocolate chips. Around the windows were candy canes and it was decorated with jelly beans and m&m’s. The sidewalk was made out of Hershey bars. There was a garden of gumdrops and lollipops.

Next to the house was a car made out of an orange circus peanut with Rolo wheels. The house had a playground in the back yard. The swings were fruit roll-ups. There was a climber made of chocolate bars with Laffy Taffy slides. There was a peanut butter cup bridge to the tree house with candy cane monkey bars on the other side. The fire pole down from the tree house was licorice.

The pool was filled with root beer with huge scoops of ice cream for people to float on. the sandbox was filled with crumbs from cinnamon graham crackers and every type of cookie. Around the sandbox were little marshmallow seats.

The back of the yard had enormous marshmallow trampolines where children could do somersaults and a ball pit filled with Skittles.

On the other side of the house was a chocolate river. Marshmallow Peep ducks and gummi fish swam cheerfully over peanut brittle rocks and between puffs of cotton candy. The rowboat was brown sugar with pretzel stick oars. Cinnamon stick and pretzel trees lined the river bank.

As the children approached the house they saw someone inside. A witch! They were afraid and ran back into the woods. Stopping for breath, they met a mouse named Charlie. He was old and wore glasses. He told them the witch was nice. Pete and Frannie decided to go back to the house. Charlie went, too. They knocked on the door. The witch came out an the kids asked for candy. The witch said, “Yes, help yourselves. But don’t eat too much because it is my house.” They ate and then they planed on and licked the playground and drank for the river. They went to visit the witch whenever they wanted to have a snack.

Bravo, Miss Melissa! If every child had a kindergarten teacher like you, the world would be a better place.

I can’t wait for the book launch on Thursday, at the Young Writers’ Tea!

Everything You Want, with Chicken

Almost as much fun as handing out free books to librarians at PLA was visiting kids’ bookstores in Minneapolis. I fell in love with Wild Rumpus the moment I saw the kid-size purple door built into the adult door. I wished I were seven again—or at least really, really short—so that I could go through it myself. Inside there was an explosion of color and—stuff. Even the ceiling was wonderful--as you walk deeper into the store it seems to crack open to reveal the sky. There was garden shed lined with books. A reading chair. Cats roamed, birds chirped in a row of cages in the back of the store. Best of all, there was a chicken.

Seriously, a chicken—wandering around the store as if it were a perfectly normal kind of indoor pet. “I think there’s a poultry connection here,” I suggested when I introduced myself and showed the book seller at the counter the cover of Everything You Want. We laughed.

It was clearly a great photo op, so I held the chicken (a first for me), the book propped in the crook of my arm. Snap. See above.

My experience at the Red Balloon was cosmic. There was a display rack featuring Catherine Clark’s Wish You Were Here and—guess what? It turned out Catherine Clark herself was at the store. She works there. We had a delightful conversation. Maybe we could fix my Jax up with her Ariel, if things didn’t work out with their love interests in the books, we thought. A whole new sequel concept.

I did remind her, though, “Wherever 'here' is, I was there first.”

I bought her newly published Wish You Were Here (which kept me very happily occupied during annoying flight delays later that day) and she promised to read my Wish You Were Here as soon as working, writing, and chasing after her two-year old allowed.

I love thinking about my books in these two stores, each one so welcoming to kids of all ages.

April 5, 1968: Morning

When I found out that Martin Luther King had been assassinated, I was heading for spring break in Florida. We left in the evening, not long after hearing the news, and drove through the night. We reached the outskirts Atlanta in the early morning. Nearing the city, we began to see black people gathered on the overpasses. Dozens and dozens of them. Just standing there.

The radio had been on all night, and I had drifted in and out of sleep to the sound of voices reporting on the violence that was breaking out in cities everywhere in the aftermath of the killing. It scared me a little to look up and see all those people. Why were they there?

Soon we passed a directional sign for the Atlanta airport—and almost instanteously, I saw a black hearse coming toward us on the other side of the interstate. Then I understood. The people were there to witness King’s coming home.

The image was seared into my brain: the somber people on the overpasses, the hearse coming toward us in slow motion, passing—like history itself passing us by. Can it be possible that I actually caught a glimpse of Coretta King, dressed in black, her head bent? It seems unlikely, but I swear I did.

We drove on to Florida, spent our few days in the sun. But I couldn’t get that image out of my mind. It still seems as real to me today as it did then, but as time goes by, it seems more a message than a memory. A reminder that we are history happening. All of us. History is made by what we do individually and as a nation—what by what we don’t have the courage to do.

We are responsible.

Mrs. Pinkerton, or Ode to Librarians

I rode my bike to the library almost every summer day when I was a kid. It was a cozy stone building with leaded windows, and I loved stepping into the sudden quiet of Mrs. Pinkerton’s realm. She sat at the big oak desk, reading glasses on a chain around her neck, library stamp in hand, at the ready to grant me whole other worlds.

She’d nod in welcome. (We rarely spoke.) I’d set the books I’d finished on the cart, then head for the children’s section, where I’d make my way slowly from A to Z, reading titles, taking one down to read the jacket flap, maybe/maybe not putting it on my pile. Mostly, I read the same books again and again. Little House on the Prairie; Betsy, Tacy, and Tib; The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. And those orange biographies: Sacajawea: American Pathfinder; Dolly Madison, Quaker Girl. Books about happy families, books about loyal friends, books about girls who’d made something of their lives.

When I’d made my choices, I’d hand them to Mrs. Pinkerton and watch with awe as she did that thing she did with the library stamp, her hand flying back and forth from the ink pad to the grid pasted in the back of each book. She’d stamp the date on my pink library card, then write in the number of books I’d checked out that day. And I’d exit, blinking, into the sunshine.

Libraries saved me then, and libraries remain among my favorite places in the world today. So I loved going to Minneapolis last week to give librarians free copies of my books at PLA.

“Hey!” I’d call out. “We have Everything You Want! Right here at the Llewellyn/Flux booth! And it’s free!”

I met lots of wonderful librarians—and a few of their teenage kids, masquerading as librarians so they could browse the exhibit hall. I met Kevin from Kalamazoo, who made my day when he told me he’d read and loved Wish You Were Here when it first came out. It made me really, really happy to give him a copy of the new paperback.

I like to think that Mrs. Pinkerton would be pleased to know that I’d grown up to write books of my own--to be checked out by librarians who are as important to kids' lives as she was to mine.

Dreaming of Assisi

It is another in a seemingly unending season of cold, gray, rainy March days, and I’m dreaming of Assisi. To be specific, I’m dreaming of a summer evening on the terrace of the Hotel Giotto in Assisi, drinking wine, eating a fabulous meal, and engaging in spirited conversation with writers and painters at Art Workshop International, as the ancient stone buildings in the valley below us turn pink with sunset and fade into night.

I attended this workshop last summer, thanks to a Creative Renewal Fellowship from the Arts Council of Indianapolis and the Lilly Endowment—not as the novelist I am, but as a (very) beginning painter. I fell in love with the work of Piero della Francesca on a trip to Umbria in 2000, my proposal explained, and knew instantly that in time I wanted to write a novel that would hinge on his work. Since then, I’ve studied his beautiful paintings, researched his life and times. But suddenly I realized that what I really need to know is how it feels to paint.

How amazing is it that my city responded, "Yes, go!"

It turns out, painting feels just like writing: you’re not here. You’re…somewhere, lost in color, the pleasures and problems of color. The tension between the story in your mind and the one it’s possible to bring to the page, based on the limitations of language, is exactly like the tension between the painting in your head and the one it’s possible to bring to the page, based on the limitations of paint. The process is equally ambiguous. Often, I thought I’d get one color when I mixed the paints, but got another. Was it a mistake? If so, what could I make of it? Or was it a fortuitous accident, something that wouldn’t have occurred to me while I was thinking what I wanted to do, but clearly the absolute right thing? How could it be, when I didn’t even know what right was?

Visual ideas are like writing ideas, too. The idea that generates a painting comes directly from your own experience—and the finished work may directly represent it or may be spun so far from that kernel of reality that it's completely unrecognizable—except to the painter. When you’re lucky, ideas come in litters, as stories do.

I loved my teacher, Bea Kreloff, who’s been painting and teaching for more than fifty years, and who shepherded me through a series of exercises that grew quickly into paintings that were in their own way as much an expression of myself as my novels are. Here are the two I like best. The one above is inspired by St. Francis’s worn, patched cloak displayed at Santa Chiara; the one below, by the marvelous Byzantine hats in Piero’s "Legend of the True Cross" in Arezzo.

One day, Bea stopped by my easel and looked at my cloaks and hats for a long moment. “I love what you’re doing with all this,” she said. “You get me. You’re making art out of what’s here, what you see.”

It seemed to me that I had never been so happy as I was at that moment.

The days passed all too quickly. The large studio, filled with light, offered a view that might have been the background of a Renaissance painting. All day painters of every level worked at their easels, stopping now and then to listen to an impromptu lecture by Bea or her partner, Edith Isaac-Rose. Outside on the terraces, writers tapped away at their laptops and scribbled in notebooks, gathering in groups each morning or afternoon to talk about their work.

Assisi itself is full of treasures, and each day I explored the small city, camera and sketchbook in hand. I followed singing pilgrims down the narrow, winding path from the Hotel Giotto to the Basilica of St. Francis, hiked up to il Rocca for a view of what seemed like the entire universe. I loved the small things that looking as a painter must look made me see: the swirl of marble, the geometry of roof tiles, the gnarled branches of olive trees, their silver-green leaves
against the blue, blue sky.

The Saturday evening before I left, a group of us joined a religious procession winding through the streets, falling in behind priests in their rich vestments, monks in their brown robes, nuns in the habits of their order, townspeople in costumes of of earlier time, carrying banners and torches. There was scent of incense drifting out from the swinging censors; the sound of church bells ringing, voices raised in chanting and prayer. The fall of our steps on the cobblestone streets seemed timeless, echoing the steps of the countless pilgrims who journeyed here over nearly a thousand years.

But it was three gangly teenage boys who careened past us on skateboards as we walked down a steep, cobblestone street on the way back to the hotel that made me feel I was in the one right place in the whole world at that one moment.

I’m going back. I am!

For now, though, I’m looking out the window at the bare trees and gloomy sky, dreaming.

Everything You Want

A box of books arrived at my doorstep this week: twenty-five copies of Everything You Want. It was almost dizzying to pull back the flaps and see all those beautiful blue books. And then to pick one up and hold it my hands! There is nothing in the world more exciting to me than the moment when a novel I’ve worked on for years (and years and years) suddenly materializes as an actual book.

This particular book, as opposed to all the various books it might have been.

The genesis of Everything You Want was a major motorcycle accident that my husband, Steve, had in 1988. He spent part of that summer in the hospital, then several months at home in a hospital bed, recuperating. I was the nurse, housekeeper, cook, visitor coordinator…whatever. I was so exhausted that one evening I collapsed into a chair in the sick room, put my head on a pile of laundry and slept three hours sitting there. I looked horrible, washed-out and gray; if I was grocery shopping and spotted someone I knew, I’d duck down another aisle so they wouldn’t see me.

Invariably, when I did see people, they’d comment on the accident, “Oh, my god. How awful!”

“It was, it is,” I’d agree. “But…”

And that’s where the book began.

I’d find myself cataloging all the lovely things that had happened because of the accident. Our friends were wonderful, providing moral and “real” support—i.e. the meals that appeared on a daily basis those first weeks at home. We realized in a way we’d never realized before how close our family was, how we could count on each other. And there’s nothing like nearly losing someone to remind you how much you love him.

What if….

Something as large as Steve’s accident happened, but it was something fabulous? People would say, “You’re so lucky,” and you’d agree, but…

Steve always plays the lottery, he always believes he’s going to win. (He hasn't, so far.)

Years ago, I was at a party and someone told a very funny story about her college-age daughter who rescued a goose from a psych experiment and brought it home to live in the pond near their home.

A quote from Ram Dass. “Each person gets their karmuppance. If you focus on God, you get God. If you want power, you get power. If you want more of something, you get it. The horror of it is that you get everything you want.”

Thus, Emma, Mac, Abby, Julie—and Freud, the goose who laid the golden egg, were born.

"A lucky lotto win, and suddenly there are fifty million reasons to be happy.

So what’s the problem?"

Read it and find out!