Stephen Lovely's 2011 Address to LAL Winners, Des Moines, May 6, 2011
Iowa author Stephen Lovely, spoke eloquently to 100 young writers and their families on the occasion of the Annual Letters About Literature Award ceremony held at the State Library of Iowa in the Ola Babcock Miller building May 6, 2011. Mr. Lovely was born in Dallas, Texas and spent most of his childhood in Ohio. He attended Kenyon College, where he majored in English and began writing fiction. After graduating from Kenyon, he moved to Boston and spent two years working on the editorial staff of Cell, a publisher of 28 different scientific journals reporting research on all aspects of the human cell.
Stephen attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop from 1990-92 and studied with many famous writers there including short story writer Deborah Eisenberg, British novelist Margot Livesey, and American novelists Ethan Canin, and Frank Conroy.
After completing his degree, Stephen worked for seven years as a night clerk in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. He began writing his acclaimed novel titled Irreplaceable (Voice, 2009) during this time.
In 2005, he became the Director of the Iowa Young Writers' Studio, a summer, residential creative writing program for high school students. He currently lives in Iowa City with his wife and their three dogs and three cats. His inspiring words follow:
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First of all, I wish I could summon all my mysterious writer’s power and make myself vanish in a cloud of smoke and be replaced by Patricia MacLachlan, or Drayton Mayrant, or Ishmael Beah, or Ann Rinaldi, or J. K. Rowling—now that would be something—or any of the other authors whose wonderful books you read, and to whom you wrote such powerful, moving letters of praise and gratitude. You deserve one of them, not me, but I’ll do my best to say, briefly, what they might wish for me to say to you, the kind of readers all authors dream of.
First I’m going to borrow some of your words.
"I felt like I was with you."
"I felt like I was right there with you."
"I feel that I have lived your hardship."
"I had never before connected with a person like that."
"I was cheering along with the crowd, but also mesmerized and almost mad at myself for how much I have been holding back."
"After Esperanza's house burned down and her family needed help, I felt as if I was trapped in a cage because I wasn't able to do anything."
"I could always sympathize for the victims in Africa, but I could never empathize with them until I read your book."
"I was shown the horror and pain and fear through her eyes."
"Her feeling happy made me feel happy too."
"The thoughts in Philip's head were so complex and unexpected that it sometimes would force me to quit reading, letting my own mind ponder the questions on his mind."
"I imagine myself in Kimi's mind."
"Although Feuille's (Feuy’s) life was much harder than mine, she inspired me to change my life."
"Reading Alpha Dog was like putting my life under a kaleidoscope."
"I understood my life a little more."
"It was like discovering daylight for the first time."
As you may have guessed, these are excerpts from your letters. What’s happening here? What’s going on as we read books, immerse ourselves in stories, meet new people (characters, we call them, even though they are as real, sometimes more real, than people we know) and slip inside their minds? We make discoveries. Other people are in tough situations similar to ones we are in, or have been in. Other people experience hardships that we are fortunate enough not to experience. Other people meet these hardships with courage, daring, determination, and creativity, and by doing so inspire us to be braver in our lives, even if our challenges are not as dramatic. As these characters in books have persisted, we may persist. As they have triumphed, we may triumph. I understood my life a little more. It was like discovering daylight for the first time.
The means by which this happens, this process of being inspired by books and the people in them, isn’t as simple as it seems. Your teachers, your parents, they all know how hard it is to stand in front of you, armed with their experience and wisdom and good intentions and oratorical skills, and inspire you to alter your life, change your ways, take a better path forward. Have you ever answered them, “Thank you. Thank you. I feel like I’ve discovered daylight for the first time!” What is it that gives books, and the characters in books, such a huge advantage over real-world people who are trying to help and shape and influence you?
We read books. It’s not as obvious as it sounds. When we read, we create a physical and mental space for ourselves and the book we have chosen (or the Nook, or Kindle, or laptop, it really doesn’t matter) and that space has certain qualities. It’s small and defined. A chair, a desk, a spot on the floor, a bed. A grassy spot under a tree. A corner of a classroom or library or coffee shop. The space is protected, insulated. Only you and the book are allowed in. No parents, no teachers, no friends. No noise, no distractions. Maybe something to drink or nibble on. If there is noise, if there are distractions, you do your best to tune them out.
Why? You and the book are going to engage in a deep, profound, complex, almost mystical communion, a kind of mental and emotional linkage during which the world of the book will flow into you, and the world of you will flow into the book. The book’s setting, its streets and alleys and fields and farms, its neighborhood, wherever that may be, and whatever size, a suburban block or an entire country, and the people who live in that neighborhood and their habits and hopes and frustrations, all flow into your mind on a current of sentences and appear with incredible vividness. Your world—your neighborhood, your friends and family, events and experiences from your life, your habits and hopes and frustrations—flow back into what you’re reading and react with it, inhabit it. If you enjoy reading, you enjoy this: the sensation of slipping into another world, into another person’s mind. You let your guard down, you give yourself up, you open yourself up in a way you’re not as likely to do when a real person is talking to you.
How much do you open yourself up? Have you ever been reading and realized that you’re actually picturing the character you’re reading about as a person you know, maybe a friend? Have you ever realized that you’re picturing the town the character lives in as your town, the school the character goes to as your school, or the house in which the character lives as your house, or a house on your street, or maybe your grandmother’s house? It’s all pretty random. If it hasn’t happened to you yet, it will. You’ll bring the character out of the book into your world. You’ll take your world into the book to the character. Your world and the world of the book mingle, and mingle so closely and subtly that you may not even notice it. Stop sometime while reading and ask yourself, "What am I picturing right now, in my head?" You may be surprised to realize you’re picturing something that wasn’t described or even mentioned in the book. You’ve put it there yourself. You’ve supplied it. You’ve colored between the lines, filled in a blank.
Here’s a famous poem by William Carlos Williams:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
What do you see when you hear this? The red wheel barrow, of course. The rain on the wheelbarrow. The white chickens. But don’t you also begin to see other things? You may picture the rain falling from the sky, though this is not described. You may picture straw or dirt on the ground, a farmyard, maybe other animals, a cow or a pig, a barn, some kind of fence, fields in the distance, trees. Your imagination, and your own memories, are filling in the blank spots, completing the picture. Did you know there’s a blank spot in every person’s field of vision, a spot that neither one of your eyes can actually see? Ask your science teachers to tell you more about it, and devise a demonstration. There’s a blank spot, but you don’t see a blank spot. Why not? Your brain fills in the spot based on what’s around it. This is similar to what happens while reading, especially poetry or fiction, except that there are many more blank spots, and you do much more filling in, more than you realize. So the experience of reading the book, the world of the book, is built out of contributions from the writer and the reader. This is why, after a while, it gets hard to tell where the world of the book ends and your world begins, where your world ends and the book begins. This is why it gets hard to tell where a character in a book ends and you begin.
This interaction between you, the reader, and a different person, the writer, in a book, in language, in an imaginary world with imaginary people—this interaction can’t happen in movies, or music, or dance, or theater, or painting with the same depth and intricacy and liveliness. As a reader, you’re collaborating with the author. The two of you are working toward a common goal, and the goal is for both of you to get inside the experiences and feelings of the book’s characters as though you were experiencing them yourself, and for both of you to bring whoever and whatever you like, your own imagination and memories, your friends and family, your own experiences and hopes and frustrations and confusions, along with you. It is literally a meeting and mingling of minds. This mingling can take place across thousands of miles, across decades and centuries, so that we as readers are able to travel across vast expanses of time and space and inhabit characters we could never have known otherwise. And we really do inhabit them. Maybe that’s what makes books, and the people in books, so valuable. People in books are inhabitable. They welcome us in. Their front doors are wide open, their rooms are yours to walk around in, their furniture yours to sit on. People in the real world generally keep their doors closed, and when they do open them and invite you in they don’t always let you stay as long as you’d like or invite you to explore the upstairs, go through their medicine cabinets, try on their clothes, read their diaries, know their deepest thoughts and secrets and hopes and fears. People in books do.
When we see someone suffering on TV, or the Internet, or read about it in a newspaper or magazine, we feel sad and sorry for them, and are often moved to pity and compassion, but we hardly see the world through their eyes, or feel it through their nerves, in the same deep, prolonged way we do when reading a book. "I feel that I have lived your hardship." "After Esperanza's house burned down and her family needed help, I felt as if I was trapped in a cage because I wasn't able to do anything." "I could always sympathize for the victims in Africa, but I could never empathize with them until I read your book." This writer has made an important point. Sympathize and empathize sound similar but have different meanings. Sympathize means to feel for, empathize to feel with. When you sympathize with someone, you feel sorry for them. When you empathize with someone, you identify with them, you enter their mind, you feel their feelings as if they were your own. "I imagine myself in Kimi's mind. Her feeling happy made me feel happy too." Empathy is the stronger feeling; empathy implies a deep emotional connection.
The whole purpose of a book, especially a fictional book, is to allow the reader to feel empathy. The writer goes deep into the minds and lives of the characters he or she creates, and he wants to reader to do the same. There’s much made in the world today about the amazing devices that allow us to connect and interact with others, cell phones and e-mail and Twitter and Facebook and Skype, online games, Second Life, and while these technologies are astonishing, nothing, nothing gives you the immersive, empathetic connection with another human being that a book does. Would you have been amazed and inspired, would you have had complex experiences and made profound changes in your lives and behavior, if you had received only a Tweet from Ishmael Beah that read, “I suffered in Africa,” or a text message from Ann Rinaldi that said, ”Life is like a moon, with a bright side and a dark side,” or if there were no Harry Potter books but only a series of status updates on J.K. Rowling’s Facebook page: “Harry and his friends have arrived at Hogwarts.” “Harry and his friends have defeated the basilisk.” “Hermione has a crush on Ron.” You see what I mean. It’s hardly the same experience. What kinds of letters might you have written in response? “Dear Ishmael Beah. Thank you for your Tweet. I’m sorry you suffered in Africa. However, since you didn’t tell us any specifics, or any kind of story, I really have no idea what you went through. Could you write more? Like, maybe a book?” “Dear J. K. R: Like your Facebook updates. Like, like, like. The characters are interesting, and I’m intrigued by this whole Hogwarts place. But the picture you paint is pretty bare. I think it could use a little expansion. Maybe a series of full-length books, describing in detail the characters and their lives and adventures, so we can begin to believe they’re real, so we can start to live with them and inhabit them and feel their feelings…?”
Why are you smiling and laughing? Because you understand. You know. You know everything I’ve just said, intuitively, or you wouldn’t be readers. You wouldn’t have been inspired to write your magnificent letters, you wouldn’t have been able to describe the experience and power of reading so accurately and vividly, and with such wisdom. So I’m not here to teach you. None of us are here, today, to teach you. You’ve already learned. We’ve all learned, your teachers and parents and librarians and I. We all love books and reading. It’s something we all share. We’re here to celebrate.
Copyright 2011 by Stephen Lovely.
