Reading in another dimension

Valorie Grace Hallinan3 Comments

I remember the book, which I think of as my Hunger Games book, and I remember the reading of it. Where I was (in my bedroom, my favorite place to read), how old I was (ten), and how I started reading as soon as I got home from school and didn’t stop until I reached the end sometime after dark.

A wrinkle in timeIn A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, Meg Murry wore glasses like me (she had a habit of pushing them up on her nose, just like me) and braces, (me too) and her hair never looked quite right (me too, again). She was a social misfit in danger of being held back a grade in school. I could slip easily into Meg’s skin; even though I had plenty of friends and good grades, I felt I could lose my tenuous social standing in a flash if anyone found out about my strange mother who, around that time, had succumbed to mental illness.

It was as if the book had been written just for me. As if, somehow, L’Engle had looked into my soul and put all of its good parts and bad parts right there on the page. I felt recognized for what I was.  Understood. Authenticated.

Meg’s family was like no other family I’d ever heard of. Her mother, Katherine Murry, was the mother I wanted: a beautiful, brilliant scientist who ran experiments in the kitchen pantry. There weren’t many scientist moms in 1965 Cleveland, Ohio, and Mrs. Murry’s brand of strangeness was the kind I could live with. (She won the Nobel Prize in a later book by L’Engle, but always had home-made cookies waiting for Meg and her younger, genius brother, Charles Wallace, when they came home from school.) Meg’s Princeton educated father worked at Cape Canaveral and had been away for a long time on a secret mission. The gossip was that he’d abandoned his family.

Meg’s friend, Calvin O’Keefe, was a revelation to me, too. He made it clear you could be from an unhappy family and still be your own strong, separate self. He was kind, popular in school, and a talented basketball player (yes, way too good to be believable) even though his mother had missing teeth, wispy, gray hair, and paddled her children with wooden spoons.

Meg, Charles Wallace, and Calvin are swept away to another dimension to search for Meg’s father and fight a great evil. I was swept away with them. This was new territory for me. I didn’t typically read fantasy or science fiction and I’d never encountered such odd, mesmerizing characters. L’Engle based the sci-fi elements of her story on Einstein’s theory of relativity, and I had always been fascinated by outer space and its mysteries. Yet, for all of its science, A Wrinkle in Time is infused with spirituality, too, and though I couldn’t have verbalized it back then, that fusion of science and spirituality rang true for me.  And while L’Engle invoked Christian themes I could relate to, she gave equal time to the Buddha, Gandhi, and the great artists. This was a viewpoint I hadn’t considered before.

A Wrinkle in Time, for me, was an escape from unhappiness, a preview, in Katherine Murry, of what a strong woman could be, and a glimpse of a different, more complex world than my own familiar one.

Many years later, I met Madeleine L’Engle when she spoke at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City, where she was the librarian and writer in residence. We shared a neighborhood, those blocks clustered around the massive Episcopal cathedral. As she spoke about her life and her beliefs, I recognized the themes I’d encountered in her fiction: a passionate spirituality inseparable from a reverence and respect for the laws and mysteries of the cosmos.

When I was doing research for this post, I discovered that this year is the 50th anniversary of A Wrinkle in Time. When it was published half a century ago, it won the Newbery Medal. Yet, because it combines fantasy with an inclusive spirituality, (rather than an exclusively Christian one) A Wrinkle in Time is often on banned book lists in schools across the country.

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Did you have a Hunger Games book when you were growing up? If so, tell us in the comments below.

Someone is always watching in The Hunger Games

Valorie Grace Hallinan10 Comments

“The greatest multiplex in the universe is in your mind, and the only ticket you need is a good, well-written novel.” Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I agree with Zafon. But still, I can’t wait for The Hunger Games movie. If it’s good, that will be partly because it’s based on a fantastic young adult novel.

On March 23, Katniss, Gale, Peeta, Primrose, Cinna, Rue and the rest of The Hunger Games’ characters will come to life on the big screen, as will the world of Panem, the futuristic North American country that emerged after climate change and war.

As YA literature goes, The Hunger Games is controversial. Every year in this harsh dystopia, twenty-four teenagers, two from each of the poor districts that serve the ruling Capitol district, are chosen in a “reaping” to fight to the death. The last contender alive wins.

These teens, some as young as twelve, kill each other on TV to entertain the Capitol citizens; their families get to watch them suffer and die.

A New York Times reviewer observed that the reality show motif adds complexity to the drama of alliances made and broken for the sake of survival. In this “double storytelling,” Katniss and Peeta must put on a good show because the audience favorites may win a share of mercy from the unseen game masters.

We, the readers, are privy to Katniss’ innermost thoughts and feelings, while we watch her present a false self to the cameras. She and Peeta form a bond that, for Katniss, may or may not be love. They play up their romance to captivate their viewers while they play out their “true” relationship under cover. Except, for all concerned, it’s sometimes hard to tell which is which.

And, in the end, they both know one of them will have to kill the other.

The Hunger Games is, in part, a nightmarish look at a culture of reality shows taken to an extreme.

It strikes me that young people are always “on.” They have never known life without incessant friending and following and posting. I’m ambivalent, to say the least, about the constant staging of oneself that’s necessary now if you don’t want to be completely out of the mainstream. 

In fact, it’s getting harder to deliberately choose privacy and anonymity. Recently, in a nearby town, over a dozen teen-age girls developed an illness with symptoms resembling Tourette Syndrome. Reporters and television cameras have besieged the town in an unrelenting media storm.  The story has gone viral.

It’s not just news. It has become our entertainment.

For peace of mind, some of the girls have given up social media altogether, at least for the time being.

Back to The Hunger Games –  there is still time to read or reread it before the movie comes out. My niece, a soon-to-become librarian, is a big fan of The Hunger Games.  She wears a mockingjay necklace (a mockingjay is a bird that symbolizes liberation from the evil Capitol) and knows everything there is to know about the upcoming movie. In fact, I found out about the movie when she posted the trailer online.

I saw it because I’m her friend on Facebook.

What was your Hunger Games book?

Did you have a Hunger Games book when you were growing up? A sci fi kind of book about a different world, that made you feel alive on every page? With a heroic character so real you could step inside his/her skin?

Tell us your Hunger Games book in the comments. I’ll tell you mine in my next post. Hint: It’s the 50th anniversary of this book’s publication.

Mary Oliver: a girl in the woods reading poetry

Valorie Grace Hallinan4 Comments

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“Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” – Mary Oliver

 

In my hometown near Cleveland, Ohio, there once was a girl who liked to play hooky from school. She’d walk in the woods and read poetry. Back then, my town still had some of its original rural flavor, with creeks, farmland, and forest where neighborhood kids could play for hours. Poetry and nature were the two things in the world the girl loved most.

When she was seventeen, the young woman got in her car and drove to the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay in upstate New York. The poet had died, but her sister, Norma, lived there. The young woman stayed for a time, helping Norma organize Millay’s papers and manuscripts, while she also wrote her own poetry.

Years later, when this same woman from Maple Heights, Ohio won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in the 1980s, I didn’t pay much attention, even though I’d been an English major in college. I was working in New York City and had left my poetry reading days behind.

It wasn’t until I was in my forties and beginning to do some of my own writing that I thought I’d take a closer look at Mary Oliver, that girl from my hometown, to see what she was all about.

I hadn’t expected to be stunned. I mean, really. Why had I never read her poetry before?

I could describe Mary’s poetry with words like “powerful” and “transcendent” and “life-changing,” but those weak words wouldn’t do her poems justice.  Let’s just say it was exactly the right time for Mary Oliver’s poems to enter my life.  A lot of it had to do with my novice efforts as a creative writer and with believing in myself.

Mary Oliver grew up in a house just around the corner from where I did, though she left home around the time I was born. Our hometown went through especially hard times around 2008. A Cleveland neighborhood nearby was called ground zero in the mortgage disaster.

Some homes were abandoned, some torn down; wildflowers and weeds took over what used to be carefully tended lawns. Much of the wooded areas are now gone, but occasionally people spot deer, usually at dusk. The town has held its own, though; the people who live there have great spirit.

When I go back home to visit, sometimes I think of a girl skipping school, sitting cross-legged under a big, friendly tree in the once nearby woods, reading poetry.

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New and Selected PoemsNew and Selected Poems, by Mary Oliver, published in 1992, includes poems from 1963 – 1991.