The Ever-Inspirational Oddity of Diana Wynne Jones! #dwj2012
Today I'm participating in my first-ever BLOG TOUR, one I absolutely could not pass up. I was bitter I wasn't part of the 50 Years 50 Days WiT tour, seeing as I've been devoting most of my YEAR to blogging about it. I nearly got to post an essay for "What BoB [SLJ's Battle of the Kids' Books] Means to Me," but passed it up because my brain wasn't working correctly, and then afterwards I was sad. But THIS TIME is different. This time Diana Wynne Jones' publishers have been throwing a monthish-long Celebration of the Life of Diana Wynne Jones, to coincide with the fresh new releases and rereleases of her books: Firebird's put out shiny new editions of Fire and Hemlock, Dogsbody, and A Tale of Time City: the last of which is actually the only one of the three I've READ yet (When my friend posted a review of it, I was adamant that we discuss the 42nd-century butter-pie things. I have no idea what they actually are, I just know I WANT ONE). I KNOW. I'll get to the not-having-read-everything-yet thing in a minute. And Greenwillow just recently put out her last book, Earwig and the Witch, which has just arrived at our library in the most recent Junior Library Guild shipment! ...and is going to put out a collection of essays called Reflections: On the Magic of Writing in the fall (note to people who like to buy me stuff: I WANT THAT, TOO. AND IT'S EASIER TO COME BY THAN A 42ND-CENTURY BUTTER-PIE). This past weekend in her hometown of Bristol there was a Grand Memorial Celebration. Everyone wants to spread the DWJ love this month, and how could I not join in? One of my FAVORITE AUTHORS EVER?
But I've already written about Diana Wynne Jones! I posted a long and heartfelt eulogy when she died. I've included her characters on both my List of Literary Crushes AND List of Literary Girl-Crushes. Me giving a very long rambling response to Little Willow's contribution to this blog tour was how I got involved with it to begin with. A month ago I realized the anniversary of her death had passed, and it prompted a long rumination on the state of my writing-- BECAUSE, as I said, she inspires me so, and I felt CALLED to... to take up her pen, or something. To WRITE FOR HER. But I haven't done a very good job of it. I've been the most un-writing so-called "writer" I can BE lately.
While writing that post, getting down on myself for my Lack of Actual Writing, I got distracted rereading my eulogy post. I remembered just how powerfully her books had affected me, had made me want to write. "I still don't know what I'm writing next," I wrote in my personal paper journal after I'd finished. "But I know what I'm READING next." I'd forgotten: just because I'd exhausted the DWJ collections of my own local libraries, I still had about half her extensive body of work to catch up on. And I have easy access to Interlibrary Loan! First thing the next work day, I placed a request for Dark Lord of Derkholm, and suddenly felt oddly hopeful about the future.
I must explain for the people who've only just shown up here: I've had a frightening problem, for a life-long bookworm, this past year. With all the review-scouring and collection-based reading I've been trying to do as a YA librarian, I've been getting BURNT OUT. After awhile I realized that I didn't want to READ anymore. UNLESS I read something truly UNIQUE. UNEXPECTED. Different from everything else. And if you need to sum up Diana Wynne Jones in one word, you could do much worse than "unique."
Flash back to December 2008. I'm sitting up late, me and the Christmas tree, husband and son already in bed, and I KNEW I should go to sleep myself: I was five months pregnant, had a toddler, two part-time jobs, and a contracted activity book writing project due in a week, ON TOP of the usual getting-ready-for-holidays stuff. But I was halfway through Howl's Moving Castle for the first time, and sleep seemed like a perfectly decent sacrifice. "This just feels... so... FRESH," I decided in a near-futile effort to pinpoint why I was having so much fun. It felt like nothing else I'd ever read. Sure, there are plenty of humorous fairy-tale-kingdom stories. There are so many stories that subvert classic fairy tale tropes that even the subversions usually feel like tropes. This was more than subversion. It was less self-conscious than that. It was a whole new universe I was seeing, through some crazy magic window like the eponymous one in Enchanted Glass, that made everything DIFFERENT.
It's all in the details, the exact right details she picks that make you really see these places and things and people as unique and fully-formed. You BELIEVE they must be real somewhere, that there's much more to them than just what you're getting right here on the page. On rereads you discover you believe things about characters that she NEVER ACTUALLY SAID-- and yet you're certain they're true.
For each next book of hers I read, it was the same: they were each so unique-- unique from each other, unique from everything else, and all so ALIVE. I developed a new theory. So many of her books involve people who can travel between alternate universes and parallel dimensions, I decided, THAT'S HOW SHE DOES IT. Every one of these worlds and characters she supposedly created is REAL, somewhere, in another universe. She just peeks on through and transcribes what she sees there!
That's the awestruck reader talking. The writer in me figures there's less supernatural involvement than that, and yet I'm still awestruck. She had this brilliant vision, this ability to see story possibilities in everything. I used this example in my eulogy post, so I'm sorry if you've already read it, but it sums up what she does so well that I have to recycle it here: "See, most people will sit around a living room and maybe notice a unique piece of artwork, the brand name of the TV, whatever. An observant person might look at a pile of cushions on a chair and say, "Hey, that chair looks like it has a face." An IMAGINATIVE person (I dare put myself in this category) might say, "and it looks EXCEEDINGLY bad-tempered and grouchy for a chair." But DIANA WYNNE JONES would look at that chair and say "I AM SO WRITING A STORY ABOUT HOW THAT BAD-TEMPERED CHAIR PERSON COMES TO LIFE AND WREAKS HAVOC!" and we end up with the first story in her Stopping for a Spell collection." She's not afraid to run with a crazy idea, and she's never content with obvious ideas-- the obvious must be taken one step further, so even the predictable isn't quite so predictable after all. I think about how the dad in Archer's Goon-- a novelist-- was required to write 2000 words of complete nonsense every month, and realize that she was probably struggling with her own writing when she came up with that little twist. The woman could even turn WRITER'S BLOCK into a story!
I know, I discovered her as an adult (unless you count me apparently reading The Lives of Christopher Chant as a kid and forgetting all about it until I picked it up again a few years ago). She didn't shape my adolescence or feed my childhood dreams as she did to so many of the rest of you. But please, don't assume that makes me any less passionate about her. She, more than any other writer, has probably done the most to feed my grownup dreams... or at least refresh the dreams I've always had. She reminds me to be open to wonder, to note the odd details, to run in wild directions. Yes, as a woman in her 30s, I've sat on the playground building elaborate daydreams of hanging out there with Sophie Hatter Jenkins/Pendragon while our kids played together (she CLAIMED they were visiting from "Wales," but I KNEW BETTER). I've nursed a crush on the droll, whip-quick Chrestomanci. I've drawn connections between her books themselves, and between her books and other stories, and her books and my dreams at night, and her books and real life. But more than that: my own imagination feels more alive after I've been reading Diana Wynne Jones. My own magic window to the Related Worlds defogs, and I feel, suddenly, that I DO have a whole alternate universe of my own that needs transcribing.
So I'm looking forward, ever more antsily, to diving back in where I left off. That copy of Dark Lord of Derkholm apparently got lost in transit from the middle school right down the street, so this whole past month I've been bursting into work, running to my mailbox... and finding it still empty. But it finally showed up, guess when-- YESTERDAY. 'Scuse me, I've got some imagination-exploring to do.
But I've already written about Diana Wynne Jones! I posted a long and heartfelt eulogy when she died. I've included her characters on both my List of Literary Crushes AND List of Literary Girl-Crushes. Me giving a very long rambling response to Little Willow's contribution to this blog tour was how I got involved with it to begin with. A month ago I realized the anniversary of her death had passed, and it prompted a long rumination on the state of my writing-- BECAUSE, as I said, she inspires me so, and I felt CALLED to... to take up her pen, or something. To WRITE FOR HER. But I haven't done a very good job of it. I've been the most un-writing so-called "writer" I can BE lately.
While writing that post, getting down on myself for my Lack of Actual Writing, I got distracted rereading my eulogy post. I remembered just how powerfully her books had affected me, had made me want to write. "I still don't know what I'm writing next," I wrote in my personal paper journal after I'd finished. "But I know what I'm READING next." I'd forgotten: just because I'd exhausted the DWJ collections of my own local libraries, I still had about half her extensive body of work to catch up on. And I have easy access to Interlibrary Loan! First thing the next work day, I placed a request for Dark Lord of Derkholm, and suddenly felt oddly hopeful about the future.
I must explain for the people who've only just shown up here: I've had a frightening problem, for a life-long bookworm, this past year. With all the review-scouring and collection-based reading I've been trying to do as a YA librarian, I've been getting BURNT OUT. After awhile I realized that I didn't want to READ anymore. UNLESS I read something truly UNIQUE. UNEXPECTED. Different from everything else. And if you need to sum up Diana Wynne Jones in one word, you could do much worse than "unique."
Flash back to December 2008. I'm sitting up late, me and the Christmas tree, husband and son already in bed, and I KNEW I should go to sleep myself: I was five months pregnant, had a toddler, two part-time jobs, and a contracted activity book writing project due in a week, ON TOP of the usual getting-ready-for-holidays stuff. But I was halfway through Howl's Moving Castle for the first time, and sleep seemed like a perfectly decent sacrifice. "This just feels... so... FRESH," I decided in a near-futile effort to pinpoint why I was having so much fun. It felt like nothing else I'd ever read. Sure, there are plenty of humorous fairy-tale-kingdom stories. There are so many stories that subvert classic fairy tale tropes that even the subversions usually feel like tropes. This was more than subversion. It was less self-conscious than that. It was a whole new universe I was seeing, through some crazy magic window like the eponymous one in Enchanted Glass, that made everything DIFFERENT.
It's all in the details, the exact right details she picks that make you really see these places and things and people as unique and fully-formed. You BELIEVE they must be real somewhere, that there's much more to them than just what you're getting right here on the page. On rereads you discover you believe things about characters that she NEVER ACTUALLY SAID-- and yet you're certain they're true.
For each next book of hers I read, it was the same: they were each so unique-- unique from each other, unique from everything else, and all so ALIVE. I developed a new theory. So many of her books involve people who can travel between alternate universes and parallel dimensions, I decided, THAT'S HOW SHE DOES IT. Every one of these worlds and characters she supposedly created is REAL, somewhere, in another universe. She just peeks on through and transcribes what she sees there!
That's the awestruck reader talking. The writer in me figures there's less supernatural involvement than that, and yet I'm still awestruck. She had this brilliant vision, this ability to see story possibilities in everything. I used this example in my eulogy post, so I'm sorry if you've already read it, but it sums up what she does so well that I have to recycle it here: "See, most people will sit around a living room and maybe notice a unique piece of artwork, the brand name of the TV, whatever. An observant person might look at a pile of cushions on a chair and say, "Hey, that chair looks like it has a face." An IMAGINATIVE person (I dare put myself in this category) might say, "and it looks EXCEEDINGLY bad-tempered and grouchy for a chair." But DIANA WYNNE JONES would look at that chair and say "I AM SO WRITING A STORY ABOUT HOW THAT BAD-TEMPERED CHAIR PERSON COMES TO LIFE AND WREAKS HAVOC!" and we end up with the first story in her Stopping for a Spell collection." She's not afraid to run with a crazy idea, and she's never content with obvious ideas-- the obvious must be taken one step further, so even the predictable isn't quite so predictable after all. I think about how the dad in Archer's Goon-- a novelist-- was required to write 2000 words of complete nonsense every month, and realize that she was probably struggling with her own writing when she came up with that little twist. The woman could even turn WRITER'S BLOCK into a story!
I know, I discovered her as an adult (unless you count me apparently reading The Lives of Christopher Chant as a kid and forgetting all about it until I picked it up again a few years ago). She didn't shape my adolescence or feed my childhood dreams as she did to so many of the rest of you. But please, don't assume that makes me any less passionate about her. She, more than any other writer, has probably done the most to feed my grownup dreams... or at least refresh the dreams I've always had. She reminds me to be open to wonder, to note the odd details, to run in wild directions. Yes, as a woman in her 30s, I've sat on the playground building elaborate daydreams of hanging out there with Sophie Hatter Jenkins/Pendragon while our kids played together (she CLAIMED they were visiting from "Wales," but I KNEW BETTER). I've nursed a crush on the droll, whip-quick Chrestomanci. I've drawn connections between her books themselves, and between her books and other stories, and her books and my dreams at night, and her books and real life. But more than that: my own imagination feels more alive after I've been reading Diana Wynne Jones. My own magic window to the Related Worlds defogs, and I feel, suddenly, that I DO have a whole alternate universe of my own that needs transcribing.
So I'm looking forward, ever more antsily, to diving back in where I left off. That copy of Dark Lord of Derkholm apparently got lost in transit from the middle school right down the street, so this whole past month I've been bursting into work, running to my mailbox... and finding it still empty. But it finally showed up, guess when-- YESTERDAY. 'Scuse me, I've got some imagination-exploring to do.