This morning I visited Horace Mann elementary school in San Francisco to talk about Darkwood. It was my first school visit: two groups of about 50 students, 6th and 7th graders, none of whom had read the whole book. I was scared. I wrote a script. I woke up at 5:00 a.m. to time myself reading different sections. Is that part boring? Is this part boring? Is my entire existence the boringest thing in the entire wide universe? I hadn’t been around a group of kids that age since I was a kid that age, but I had a pretty good idea that if they were bored, they let you know it.
But they weren’t bored! Or if they were they were really polite and I couldn’t tell! They had smart, bright, open faces and asked so many questions I didn’t need to do all that reading I’d planned out like a marathon training run. (I read part, with monsters and eyeballs in it, and, despite my best efforts, a long description of foliage.)
Here were some of their questions:
“How did her mother die?”
“How did her father die?”
“How did her sister die?”
“Are the cats going to die?”
“Why is the book so expensive?”
“How many copies did you sell?”
“Is her uncle an alcoholic?”
“Does kinderstalk mean something about children?”
“How old are you?”
“Did you draw the cover?”
“Is your dog in it?”
“What emotions did you feel when you were writing?”
“Do you use words like the words in here when you talk?”
“Are you going to write another book like this one?”
“Are you going to write another kind of book?”
“Is this the story of your life?”
No, I wanted to say, this is the story of my life, hanging out here with you guys, beside a podium crammed into a doorway, in shoes that feel a little bit too slippery for the high-polish lino of the school floors, with the wind gusting off Valencia street sounding like your very own library ghost. I wanted to tell them I was having a sort of Sally Field at the Oscars moment in reverse: I like you! I really like you!
I wrote this book for kids but I wasn’t thinking about kids when I wrote it. I wasn’t thinking about anything but it when I wrote it, its people and animals and their world, and now it turns out I was writing it for exactly the right people in this world. I wrote my way straight to the Horace Mann school. I had no idea. What a trip.
