Jane Kurtz's Acceptance Speech
As Nikki Giovanni
said in her opening speech, life is hard and the life of an author or
illustrator trying to get or keep published is particularly hard. We
hold onto the things that sustain us, so for a month or two I've been
carrying this card in my calendar. A writer friend sent it to
congratulate me on the Golden Kite award. She said, "What a beautiful,
deeply moving story you've written, told in language that sings its way
into the heart." She also said, "North Dakota is truly lucky to have
you as its bard."
Actually, I'm the lucky one. My
parents moved to Ethiopia to work for the Presbyterian church when I
was only two years old, and they couldn't take a lot of books with
them, so our household had few books, but each book was a treasure, and
I developed a thunderous passion for words and books. I grew up in a
beautiful, enchanted place. Still, since my family and a nurse and
teacher were the only people speaking English, I always knew I was
different. When I heard my parents say that we were going "home" for a
visit the year I was seven, I thought that in the U.S. I would not feel
different.
After we landed in New York, my mom
sat her four daughters down in the hotel room and said, "We're going
downstairs to get some lunch. We're in America, now, so be sure to eat
with your forks." Some time later, she looked down the line we made at
the lunch counter and tried to whisper discretely, "Tell Janie she can
eat her potato chips with her fingers."
When the message reached me, I blared in my seven-year-old voice, "Which are the potato chips?"
So much for not feeling like an outsider. I can't tell you how many kids that year stared and asked, "Did you see Tarzan?"
By the time I came
back to the U.S. for college, I was convinced it was impossible to talk
to people here about Ethiopia. I wrote poetry about my American life
some of which was published in literary journals and had little
American kids. Remember, I grew up with few books, so it was in reading
hundreds of books to my own children that I really discovered
children's literature, fell in love with children's books, and
developed a longing to have one published.
But my children
were young and I was isolated, and I spent ten years out in the
darkness with my nose pressed to the window of that beautiful, lighted
room where (I imagined) published authors danced and laughed. During
that ten years, I kept reading; I kept writing; and I held onto SCBWI
as just about the only candle I had with me out there in the dark,
which is why this moment of honor from SCBWI feels so special and so
fitting.
During those ten
years, I also told myself that certain things I would never write
about.
I said Iíd never write about the years of war and starvation in
Ethiopia that people so often asked me about, because I wanted to write
about the beautiful country of my childhood. Yet my first published
novel, The Storyteller's Beads,
was set in just that time. I said Iíd never write about the agonies of
moving back and forth between cultures because those experiences were
just too hard to capture, yet my newest novel, Jakarta Missing,
finally tries to tell pieces of that story. And, when the Red River
flooded Grand Forks and we were forced to evacuate our home, people
kept telling me, "You'll write about it." But I didn't think I would.
The pain was too fresh.
When I was at IRA in Atlanta that year, I roomed with Deborah Wiles and Deborah Hopkinson who won a Golden Kite last year. After Deborah Hopkinson
heard me talk about writing poetry with kids and helping them capture
the details of their daily lives, she asked, "What if you used poetry
to tell the story of the flood?" When I got home to the muck and mess,
I found that was exactly what I wanted to do. My then-editor at Simon
& Schuster, Stephanie Owens Lurie, loved the poems but wanted a
little more story. Again, it was in talking with a group of writer
friends at ALA that the idea of the cat came up. What if we, as I had
urged, had left our cat behind, as so many people in Grand Forks did?
It was the perfect solution. So many readers have told me, "I just had
to find out what happened to the cat."
So, I am the one
who is lucky, because life is hard and the publishing life is
particularly hard and yet words have power to bring healing and have
helped me bridge gaps between my experiences and yours, including
cultural gaps. (And lest you think that my only cultural gaps have been
with my books set in Ethiopia, I should tell you that friends of mine
sent River Friendly, River Wild to their grandkids in
Arizona, and when the book was being read aloud, one grandchild tapped
his mom on the arm and asked, "What's a BASEMENT?"
I'm lucky because
writers and illustrators of children's books are very cool people to
hang around with. I've learned so much about my own writing and
experienced so much pleasure reading books written by my fellow SCBWI
members. I have been encouraged and strengthened by writers in this
very room. After the flood, my writing community enveloped me. In fact,
at one point, my husband said to me, "My friends have been sending
e-mails and letters saying 'we're praying for you.' Your friends send
money."
My friends also sent quilt squares to Jacqueline Briggs Martin, author of the wonderful Snowflake Bentley, and she and her mom put them together in a quilt for me. (Here Toni Buzzeo and Dian Curtis Regan held up the quilt.)
The quilt warmed me on so many nights when I thought I couldn't go on.
So (with appreciation to Andrea Pinkney for this image) thank you all
of you -- for being there to hold the flashlight while I dug out of the
muck.
