Lois Lowry

I was pleased to be invited to an event at the Boston Public Library (BPL) last week featuring two-time Newbery Award winner Lois Lowry. All we children’s book fans must have RSVPd at once because first I was on the waiting list, then the evening before I received an email saying there was a seat for me. The event was actually to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the BPL's Writer-in-Residence Program.

This is a wonderful program, funded by an anonymous donor, that provides an emerging children’s writer with the financial support, editorial assistance, and office space needed to complete one literary work for children or young adults. They get a $23,000 stipend, up to $2,000 of additional funding for coaching / editorial assistance, an office at the main library in Copley Square, and presumably attention from agents.

Because they were celebrating 20 years, there was a video featuring all the previous writers and describing the books they have published since being in the program (none of which I had heard of but several sounded interesting). The new committee chair, the retiring committee chair, the writer who had just finished her year, the one who was about to start her year, and the president of the BPL all spoke (some at length), and although we clapped generously I was not the only one impatiently waiting for the main event.

Finally, Lois Lowry was introduced, and although she did not have planned remarks, her theme was basically how she became a writer, which she said followed being a dedicated reader. She grew up in an army family, living all over the world, and became a lifelong library fan in Pennsylvania when her father was overseas during WWII – she said the library was her cathedral – and in Tokyo after the war where her library . She even spent time on Governor’s Island during high school (Janet Lambert alert) and her father gave her a typewriter, perhaps believing in her writing career before she did. She studied with Charles Philbrick, a noted poet and professor at Brown but told us she dropped out to marry a football player and got distracted by raising four children with him in Maine (the marriage did not last). It was not until she was nearly 40 that someone suggested she write juvenile fiction and her first book, A Summer to Die (1977), was based on her older sister’s terminal illness. She told us she was newly divorced and practically penniless when it was accepted and the advance was less than $2,000. When she got invited to Texas to receive an award she had to tell her editor she couldn’t afford to go (he told her the publisher would pay).

I have only read Lowry’s books as an adult. She is best known for winning the Newbery Medal in 1990 for two very serious novels, Number the Stars (my review), and in 1994 for The Giver, a dystopian novel before they were common in juvenile fiction. Her books about Anastasia Krupnik, a girl who grows up in Cambridge, with a painter mother and a father who is a poet and teaches at Harvard, are more lighthearted. Lowry read us two fan letters she had received that week, then read us a funny excerpt from one of the Anastasia books in which Anastasia decides to answer some of her father’s fan mail. Lowry even made a joke about JD Vance (not that he is funny but we all laughed) and said she would conclude so we could all get home for the debate. There was a reception but the library was about to close so I nibbled quickly and did not get a chance to meet Lowry before dashing for the subway home. I got Anastasia Krupnik from the library the next day and really enjoyed it. Lowry wrote nine books about Anastasia from 1979-95, as well as four books about her brother Sam, and now I am tempted to read the whole series.

Off the Blog: I am in New York for the weekend, visiting my sister, and this is the view from the rooftop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art where we visited a Tiffany & Co. exhibit.