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	growing child education

For the Love of Words
By Betsy James
Issue 145, November/December 2007

Meadowlark nestlings learn the songs they have heard their parents sing while still in the shell. Orca babies learn the dialects of their adult pod. Human babies pick up their parents' speech. But it wasn't our mom's Brooklynese or our dad's L.A. Spanish that the three James kids caught in the nest. It was their love of words. And because they took it for granted that writing was just another way to speak, we learned to write the way we learned to talk: by using it to say how we felt, what we wanted, what was funny and interesting and real.

Long before we intelligent primates had alphabets, we had lullabies and circle games and, I do not doubt, some forerunner of the awful limerick. Because writing begins with the sung and spoken word, its foundations are laid effortlessly when parents engage in wordplay themselves. Our mother, long a camp counselor, was a walking compendium of little recitations.

I-i-i-into the woods went the bear.
I-i-i-into the woods went Algy.
O-o-o-out of the woods came the bear...
And the bear was bulgy...
And the bulge was Algy.

We grew up chanting nursery rhymes, hand slaps, jump-rope ditties. We punned, learning early that the bun is the lowest form of wheat, and the limerick (thank you, Edward Lear) the lowest form of verse. Mom could recite Kipling's "The Ballad of East and West" right through, and when we were sick she lulled us to sleep with it. Given the era's usual round of chicken pox, mumps, measles, and bronchitis, I could chant it along with her by the time I was nine. And of course we did "Jabberwocky."

Like meadowlark nestlings, we sang with our parents all the time: camp songs, folk songs, school songs, church songs, and dubious lyrics from Mom's days as a biology grad student. I'm sure we were the only kids in Utah who sang about zygotes.

Raffi this stuff was not. We wailed the "St. James Infirmary Blues":

I went down to the Saint James Infirmary
For to see my baby there,
She was laid out on a table,
So white, so cold, so fair.

"Inappropriate for children" was the family norm. We ate it up. I searched the public library for numbers by my favorite songwriter, some guy called Anonymous—weird name, but he wrote fantastic stuff.

And of course we talked, talked, talked.

Surrounded by song and gab, it was only a step to wanting to write it down. How could we not, when the house was full of books? Books in homemade bookcases, books in the living room and bedrooms and basement, books on the kitchen table and the coffee table, under the covers with a flashlight, and in the john. Great Books, kids' books, cookbooks, books about poetry and flatworms and dinosaurs and rockhounding and fairy tales and how to fix your truck. Books as furniture. Library books. Books read and reread.

There was a family book conspiracy. Every birthday brought several. Early on, our grandparents established a "Book Club" among the eight cousins: Once a month, round robin, one of us could buy our most coveted volume. We each had our own bookcase. We were library brats too, of course, but when it comes to a favorite book, there's nothing like writing your name in it, in the painful cursive you're just getting a handle on.

I swear, people left books on our doorstep in baskets with "Please take care of my baby" pinned to their little shirtfronts. They must have. How else could we have gotten so many books? We knew where books came from long before we knew where babies came from. (Though we learned about babies early. Mom being a biologist, there were reference books on kid-height shelves—explicit, but not what you'd call riveting.) We saw our mom and dad writing letters, papers, even parts of books. It was easy to assume that writing was something that people we liked liked to do, a coveted grown-up skill. We wanted to do it ourselves.

An ironclad family rule forbade the purchase of gifts for family members; they had to be handmade. When we got sick of cranking out bookmarks, woven potholders, and, in my older brother's case, a set of candlesticks made from polished Chevy pistons (our Victorian grandmother was nonplused but courteous), we wrote books. My mother called them "love books," because that's what they were: small, glue-stained, lopsided, and passionate. Storybooks about apple trees and schnauzers and pointy-hatted princesses; scholarly tomes on a bizarre range of, well, scientific topics. Mom was a tad startled when, at seven, my younger brother produced, as a birthday present for said Vic-torian grandmother, an illustrated autobiography titled How I Was Born. However, page one began, "Here I am in my crib." Was that when Mom shifted those reference books to a shelf we could reach? If our technical papers needed a footnote for cachet, we made one up. No wonder I became a fantasist.

Now that I'm grown up and a "real" author, people ask me what books of mine have been most beloved and cherished. Not the ones you can find in the library. It's those faded love books, hands down. But it wasn't solely the family book fetish that ensured, almost effortlessly, that we'd grow into articulate teens who liked to write. The James kids wrote letters and were written to. I'm not talking about obligatory thank-you notes written in the shadow of an adult holding a blunt instrument, though we certainly wrote, and bewailed, plenty of those. I mean letters that said things. To receive a serious letter, addressed to oneself and requiring a real answer, was a badge of adulthood. As was ownership of a fountain pen. Sane people don't give fountain pens to kids.

One grandfather in particular, classically crusty and crotchety, wrote four- and five-page letters in which he asked opinions and expected answers. Sometimes he went so far as to include Latin; chasing down the meaning was a cross between a treasure hunt and a real pain in the neck. We always figured them out in the end—mirabile dictu! (Look it up.)

Though we had to grow into owning a fountain pen, pencil and paper were always available to us, as were the other ingredients of literary projects: paint, markers, staples, tape. We could use all the clear tape we liked, but for some reason masking tape was doled out by the inch. I still have an irrational awe of masking tape. In the basement we kids had a grim old Remington upright typewriter on which we could batter at will. If you picked up a finished page and blew hard, the centers of all the Os flew away. Still, with enough strikeovers, you could type

Tis mornig Mrs Boonstr dgxx dog run ran awayand bit Mr. Andrus
onthe xxxx lag leg

Tell me, tell me, dear little flow'r,
Why do you bend there hour by hour?

For my mother's birthday, I gathered each year's poetry output into a handmade anthology and illustrated it. I wish I could say it was out of gratitude for her going my bail with Mrs. Knudsen, but really, I just liked to write poetry.

We each owned a rickety Goodwill desk. Mine had a drop front; the supporting chain was broken, so I had to open the bottom drawer to keep the writing surface level. It had cubbyholes for pencils, erasers, (clear) tape, the grown-up fountain pen, and sticks of sealing wax. To hide the mess of creation, which was chronic, I could raise the drop front and close the desk completely. It had a lock—but no key. My mother took note of this, and for my eleventh birthday gave me a tin file box with two keys. "So you'll have writing privacy from your brothers," she said. "And from me."

She gave me her word that she would never read my writing without my permission. It was a promise she kept all her life. Wise woman! She could see I was writing more, and fervently—diaries, poems, stories. Writing had become the way I worked at understanding myself.

I could agree with the writer E. M. Forster, who said, "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" Mom knew I needed a safe place to listen to my soul.

Her touching trust did not stop me, if suddenly interrupted, from hurling my entire body over whatever I was writing. "Hi, whatcha doing?" "NOTHING, MOM." Or from taking a permanent marker and writing Private! Explosives! Do Not Touch!! on the always-locked tin box and shoving it as far as possible back under my bed, among the dust kitties.

With the freedom born of privacy, I went on to write about one thousand poems, one million stories (which I invariably tore up into tiny pieces), one billion journals, and one bazillion letters, still counting. And, along the way, a shelf full of award-winning books.

None of my books has Latin in it, Grandpa. But they are full of talkers and their jokes, singers and their songs, and children who chant hand slaps and circle games and jump-rope rhymes. Their very existence is testimony to how books are born from a love of human speech, and to the family that, beginning with a delight in words and then adding paper, made all its children writers.

Read the side bar: How To Hatch a Natural Writer

Betsy James is the award-winning author and illustrator of many books for children and young adults. Her latest novel, Listening at the Gate (Atheneum), is a New York Public Library Best Book for the Teen Age, and a Tiptree Award Honor Book, "for stories that explore and expand gender roles." For more thoughts on writing, visit her on the Web at www.betsyjames.com..