Connecticut Center for the Book | CT Community of the Book

Authors' Responses:

Dick Allen, Poet
The Day Before: New Poems       Connecticut Book Award finalist 2004 Flight and Pursuit: Poems
Ode to the Cold War: Poems New and Selected

Without books. . . impossible! I grew up in a very small town and the public library was all that led me out from under the town’s various protections. Here in the library were concepts that neither my parents nor my teachers held; here were the books I couldn’t afford but was expected to read if I was to win my freedom with a college scholarship. Here was The Iliad, The Odyssey, an edition of The Divine Comedy fantastically illustrated by Gustave Dore (could I have finished it without those illustrations?), every one of Shakespeare’s plays in several delicious kinds of leather editions, Faust, and Crime and Punishment, a book of Chinese poetry, the main Greek dramas, and The Origin of Species my Bible School teacher didn’t want to discuss. And Emerson’s essays—all of them, but most especially “Self-Reliance. And Thoreau’s Walden: “. . . perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.”
Again and again, I took the books with me, hardcovers then when now I might seek paperbacks. I copied out passages. I read chapters silently, late into mountain nights. I would go forward a few pages and then turn back, rereading to make sure I’d understood. No teacher hushed me, no opinionated and lowly educated eighth grade bully shouted me down, no minister said I should not question, no parent told me what was right as rain. Without books, without literature, how could I or any of us have wandered into our own?

Susan Aller, Author
Emma and the Night Dogs
George Eastman
J.M. Barrie: The Magic Behind Peter Pan

Dana Gioia hits the mark when he talks about the "irreplaceable forms of focused attention and contemplation" that are uniquely enabled by the printed word.
As an author of books for children - and a mother and grandmother - I know the transforming power of books read with a child nestled in a lap or in bed before sleep. Who among us has not gone down the rabbit hole with Alice, or down the river with Huck, or into the night sky with Peter? These and thousands of other memorable stories are in books -- on paper printed with words -- that stimulate all the senses and awaken the creative imaginations of the reader.
And incidentally, who among us remembers hugging a DVD or tape deck in the same way that we cherished our well-read and often tattered childhood books?

Gail Gauthier, Author
The Hero of Ticonderoga
My Life among Aliens
Saving the Planet & Stuff       Connecticut Book Award finalist 2004

Literature has been described as an attempt to communicate experience--joys, thrills, fears, failures, and successes that we can then absorb and share through reading. As marvelous as movies and TV may be, we viewers are always left in the position of just watching the experience on the screen. Only by reading can we internalize an experience enough to feel we are living it. We suck it up off the page, and it becomes ours.
And then we open another book and do it again with an entirely different situation and cast of characters.
The political system hasn't been created that can offer us more than one life. Only reading can do that.

Margaret Gibson, Poet
Autumn Grasses       Connecticut Book Award finalist 2004
Earth Elegy
Icon and Evidence       Connecticut Book Award finalist 2002

“A Reflection on the Power of Literature”
The time for reverie and reflection given me by literature when I was young enabled me to re-imagine my life and my responses to others in a social world that, in the 1950’s in the South, was limited in its ability to embrace the full humanity of every person, whatever his or her race or class. Reading about other societies and countries as well as my own nurtured curiosity, tolerance, and compassion. Reading gave me time for remembering, asking questions, seeing anew. Reading offered an exploration of inner space, letting me discover that others as well as I asked essential questions—Who am I? What do I love? How shall I live, knowing I will die? Reading confirmed my humanity in its deepest sense and put me in touch with the humanity of all others. The pleasures of reading became, in time, the pleasure and necessity of writing poems, because I knew that what I could offer in words could be received by another in reverie and reflection. Reading and writing are social acts that promote what Martin Buber called I-Thou relationships. In the solitude of reading, therefore, one makes community more possible.

Dolores Hayden, Author; faculty, Yale University
American Yard
Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Growth, 1820-2000
A Field Guide to Sprawl

I belong to a mother-daughter book group. Six mothers (a pediatrician, a psychiatrist, a Yale administrator, a lawyer, an architect, and a Yale professor) and six daughters (two from from New Haven, two from Hamden, one from Bethany, and one from Guilford) come together every eight weeks or so to discuss one book we have all read. Each girl gets to choose one book per year. We started when the girls were in fifth grade and now they are high school seniors. Our eight years of reading, talking, and sharing our reactions to authors have been years of growth and change for the girls, years of middle age and challenge for the moms. We have read about Latin America and Saudi Arabia, New York and California. No one can say that we have a single favorite author. We all love to read. We celebrate reading.

Janice Law (Trecker), Author
The Lost Diaries of Iris Weed       Connecticut Book Award finalist 2003 The Night Bus
Voices       Connecticut Book Award finalist 2004

True reading cannot be passive and mechanical. Reading, particularly of literature, requires imagination, and the development of imagination is necessary for the conception of alternatives. Without the ability to imagine something different, we are bound by the narrowness of our own experience, the wisdom of our tribe, and, increasingly, by the packaged fantasies and agendas of the corporate world, which have proved toxic to much of our public life.
Real literature, in contrast, takes us to new places; it puts us in another person’s shoes, it makes us think “what if” and “if only”. But reading can only do this if we come to it as willing partners. Walt Whitman said that he didn’t write for a dollar or to pass the time waiting for a boat. The true reader doesn’t come to books just to pass the time, but to participate in the work of the imagination.

Okey Ndibe, Novelist; faculty, Simon’s Rock College of Bard
Arrows of Rain

Literature enchants our lives and enlarges our imaginations, two bounties that dictators and sundry enemies of human freedom are menaced by. Those driven by the will to dominate, to degrade, to dehumanize and to discount others often fantasize about a world shorn of stories, filled with silence. The constituents of literature--those who produce it as well as those who find comfort, light or strength within its variety and humanistic amplitude--must combat the compulsions of silence, the seductions of a storyless world. This, I suggest, is the abiding and most urgent challenge of any epoch, and especially pertinent for our time, plagued by extremisms and rabid orthodoxies. To paraphrase a character in my novel, Arrows of Rain: the fabric of memory is rent by silences, reinforced by stories. We labor in vain and suffer meaninglessly if we don't leave behind accounts of our existential engagements, if we don't find ways to enshrine our struggles in moving metaphors and imperishable tablets.

Marilyn Nelson, Poet Laureate of Connecticut; faculty, University of Connecticut
Carver: A Life in Poems       Connecticut Book Award winner 2002 (Poetry, Design, Children’s Literature)
The Fields of Praise
Fortune’s Bones: The Manumission Requiem

I happened to watch "Reading Rainbow" on TV yesterday, and was struck by one image: an elementary school class sitting on the floor, each child working with a laptop computer. While, of course, the computer is an invaluable tool, it is decidedly NOT a book. We do not know -- I hope we will never know -- how computer-only reading would affect a society; what we do know is that the tactile, sensual experience of holding a book, turning its pages, inwardly interacting with its text, is quite different from the experience of working at a computer. There is pleasure, and then there is pleasure. The pleasure of the book is a whole pleasure; that of the computer partial. A good book can be a companion, a friend: someone to be shipwrecked with on a desert island. Its pages offer layer upon layer upon layer, to be reread, discovered, savored.

Stewart O’Nan, Author
The Good Wife
The Night Country       Connecticut Book Award winner 2004
Wish You Were Here       Connecticut Book Award winner 2003

It's not only in totalitarian or authoritarian regimes that writing keeps dissidence alive, it's everywhere and always. The very best writing--fiction, poetry, nonfiction, whatever form it takes--speaks a truth unavailable anywhere else, and certainly not from any official sources, and that written truth reaches, by necessity, only one person at a time, like a whispered secret. The reader has the freedom to accept or reject that secret, to act or not act on it.

Sam Pickering, Author; faculty, University of Connecticut
The Blue Caterpillar and Other Essays
The Last Book
Waltzing the Magpies: A Year in Australia       Connecticut Book Award finalist 2005

I don't know if I can come up with a response. I am just back from our farm in Nova Scotia. But what all three quotations miss is that reading is fun. The quotations make reading therapy, comparable to getting your wisdom teeth yanked out -- something necessary but unpleasant.

Dan Pope, Author
In the Cherry Tree

“On Defeating Boredom”
In Joseph Brodsky's essay, "In Praise of Boredom," he puts forth the thesis that life is, essentially, boring. "You'll be bored with your work, your friends, your spouses, your lovers, the view from your window, the furniture or wallpaper in your room, your thoughts themselves." He advises us to embrace our boredom, rather than chase fleeting respites to it.
But reading Brodsky's essay is a refutation to his theory, as it did not bore me. I am never bored in the presence of a good book, and therefore I carry one everywhere. Being stranded someplace — a dentist's office, say, or a bathroom stall — without quality reading material is unthinkable.
Take the cereal box. If only there were short stories printed on the back instead of advertisements and nutritional information I knew a woman in Iowa City who used to walk all over town with a book in front of her face. She rarely ever stumbled or walked into traffic. People thought she was eccentric, I'm sure, but I loved seeing her go by.
I wish I could read while driving my Saab. The few times I tried doing so were nearly catastrophic. Audio books are okay, but I miss the pleasure of running my eyes across the page.
In Rome once, seeing the Campodolio for the first time, I found a bench and took out my copy of Lucky Jim. My girlfriend gave me a funny look. "You're going to read?" Sure, there were a lot of ruins, but I was just twenty pages from the end. I had to see how it turned out.

Luanne Rice, Author
Beach Girls
Dance with Me
The Perfect Summer

“In Honor of Reading Lolita in Tehran: a Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi”
I was born in the United States, where we have a Constitution whose First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, and I have lived here my whole life except for two years when I lived in Paris, in the Eighth Arrondissement, overlooking the courtyard of a hotel with red awnings, which was hardly oppressive. So I’m humbled to be writing this in honor of Azar Nafisi’s visit to the library.
While I lived in Paris, I took a train to Amsterdam to see the Anne Frank house. In fourth grade at Vance School in New Britain, we had read her diary. The small everyday details of Anne’s life made me love her, and feel I knew her. Like me, she had loved and rebelled against her parents, liked a boy, fought with her sister. She had also lived in hiding from the Nazis, watched neighbors being dragged from their homes, worried her family would be killed—and written about it. For a young girl living in the secret annex, that was an act of dissidence. Here is a quote from Tuesday, April 4, 1944:
“I want to go on living even after my death! And therefore I am grateful to God for giving me this gift, this possibility of developing myself and of writing, of expressing all that is in me. I can shake off everything if I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn."
Writing as salvation… Anne wrote what the world wasn’t supposed to read. The power in that act is nearly unfathomable to those of us protected by the First Amendment. Reading brought me into Anne’s world and changed me, showed me what one voice can do. Her words have always meant so much to me. Not only for what they say, but for the very fact she wrote them.

Pegi Deitz Shea, Author
Liberty Rising: The Story of the Statue of Liberty
Tangled Threads       Connecticut Book Award winner 2004
The Whispering Cloth: A Refugee’s Story

“To Write Is Freedom: A Reaction to "Literature is Freedom" by Susan Sontag
It was 103 degrees in the Thai refugee camp. Forty thousand Hmong war refugees crouched in huts. No running water to drink, cool down with, or flush away filth. No electricity to power a fan or a radio. No books. No hope. Some had lived like this for more then ten years.
Witnessing this dusty hell in 1989 changed my life. I knew I had to write about bigger things than business achievements. I had to write about this. But the Thai soldiers said I couldn’t. They said I couldn’t take pictures either. I did both. No one can tell me what to write about. No one can tell me how to think.
Since 1989, the bulk of my writing for both young and adult readers has tackled human rights issues such as warehousing war refugees, child labor, child soldiering, sexual abuse and illiteracy. It is my responsibility as a dissident-at-large to show the dissonance in the world to readers who have not yet opened their eyes, much less their hearts. I do not tell people how to think. I merely show them a passport to a larger life, and hope they take it.

Vivian Shipley, Poet; faculty, Southern Connecticut State University
Crazy Quilt
Down of Hawk
When There Is No Shore       Connecticut Book Award winner 2003

The printed word can keep alive names of people and details about their lives that might otherwise be forgotten if they are only orally transmitted. My goal in writing poems is to keep my subjects from anonymity like those beneath grave markers where names and dates have eroded over time. Emily Dickinson kept her poems packed away in trunks and after her death, only their publication in print preserved her inner life and her identity as a poet. To preserve the memory of lives of other women, I have written poems about international subjects such as Bronislawa Wajs, the gypsy poet who was banished by her tribe and Charlotte Mew, the British poet who killed herself by drinking Lysol. Several of my poems are about New England women. One is about Winifred Benham, the last woman in Connecticut to be tried for witchcraft, in Hartford on October 7, 1697. Another dramatizes the trial of Elizabeth Atwood from Ipswich, Massachusetts, who was hung at gallow’s lot on Pingrey’s Plain on June 23, 1720, for concealing the death of her newborn illegitimate son. The site of Atwood’s death is now famous for the Clam Box (NYT, August 21, 2002) and people come not to remember Elizabeth, but to buy deep-fried Ipswich clams from Marina Aggelakis, known as Chickie.
I have also written about Rebecca Nurse who was hung in Salem, Massachusetts on July 19, 1692, for witchcraft, and Lizzie Borden. The lives of both women have been commercialized and trivialized, Nurse by the AAA-approved Salem Witch Museum, and Borden by sugar cookies shaped like axes sold at the Borden Bed and Breakfast Museum in Fall River, Massachusetts. In these New England towns, many men and women took great pride in work that defined their lives, but these good mill workers are not remembered, only the axe-wielding Lizzie and women accused of being witches. In our oral tradition that Dana Gioia mentions, a name must have a voice with a throat to channel it, a starling like the one Shakespeare’s Hotspur coached to speak it. Ultimately, however, unrecorded, memory of a name, of a life thickens to amnesia, then vanishes if there is no print to hold it in place on this earth.

Katharine Weber, Author; faculty, Yale University
The Little Women       Connecticut Book Award finalist 2004
The Music Lesson
Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear

Apropos: Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom. -- Susan Sontag
The printed word has always been, and will always be, the way readers can find out what the rest of the world is like. How do other people think, how do they feel? How do they live? What do they have? What do they want? This is why we tell our stories, and this is why we read stories. I was a reader before I was a writer. Even as a child I was drawn to fiction, because it was the way I could discover over and over again that other human beings were just as human as I was (to borrow a phrase from the wonderful novelist A.L. Kennedy). What I found in fiction was nothing less than the honoring of imagination, the very quality in my work for which I was often humiliated in school by some very unimaginative teachers. Without imagination we are—as individuals, as families, as governments, as human being here on earth—at risk for being helpless and impoverished, politically helpless, uninformed about what it is to be human and to be alive.

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