Читать книгу The Giver, Gathering Blue, Messenger, Son - Lois Lowry, Lois Lowry - Страница 34

What is one of your favourite memories?

Well, once I spent a very quiet hour in the hills on the island of Bali. I was there with my friend Kitty, but she had climbed down a steep slope to see a ruined temple, and I was hot and tired, and decided to wait for her partway down. I saw an old fashioned soft-drink cooler, the kind where you lift a lid and reach in to get a cold drink, on the porch of a small shack on the side of the path, and the woman there, to my gestured question, indicated that yes, I could get a drink and sit down. So I waited there for Kitty.

I gave the woman some money, sipped my drink, and watched children playing on the steep path. Somehow, through sign language, I asked the woman … my hostess, for it was her house where I sat on the porch … if the children were hers. Three, she replied, holding up three fingers and then pointing to the ones she meant. Then, somehow, again with sign language, she asked if I had children, and I too held up three fingers and we smiled at each other.

But I didn’t feel quite right about my answer. I had had four children, actually, and one had died just a few months before this encounter. Saying “I have three” didn’t yet feel comfortable to me (perhaps it never would, never has) and so I tried to explain … tiptoeing through the language barrier, using my hands … that once I had had four. To my amazement, she understood, and then replied, using her hands, that she too had once had four children. I cannot remember exactly how we conducted the resulting conversation. But we did, and we understood each other. She asked what had happened, and I pointed to the sky, describing with my hands the downward plunge, the explosion as it crashed, and that I had lost my son that way. She expressed sorrow, and told me her own tragedy: a child climbing, and falling from a high place in these hills; a head injury; the very difficult journey to the only hospital in Denpasar many miles away, the fact that the child could not be saved.

We sat there in silence for a while. She reached over, then, and touched my hand. We had not exchanged a single word that either of us could understand. But we had exchanged two lives with each other, and had crossed an enormous barrier. It’s a memory I treasure.

What is the strangest dream you have had?

I don’t know if this qualifies as “strange” but it’s interesting, and it’s a dream that I love. Again and again I have dreamed that I’ve bought, or rented, a new house and am moving into it when I discover that there is a door, sometimes a stairway, that I hadn’t known about. It leads to a whole wonderful room that I hadn’t known was there.

What colour do you think best reflects you?

I suppose blue. The book of mine called Gathering Blue – which follows The Giver – centres around the colour blue. How it represents serenity and peace, and how difficult it is to find, but how important the search for it is. That reflects me, I think.

What is your favourite children’s book?

That’s a hard question to answer. There are so many wonderful books. I do love the book Sarah Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan.

What do you most enjoy about writing?

I love the solitude, the sitting at my desk, watching the words appear on my computer screen, hearing how they sound, the work of rearranging them, seeing them fall into the right order, the place where they have meaning and the right cadence.

What is the best piece of advice anyone has ever given you? In regard to writing:

“Start on the day that is different” is a piece of advice I have valued. It’s so simple but so effective. It has to do with how to begin a book or a story.

If you were stranded on a desert island what? three things would you want with you?

A good friend, some good food and some good books. I wouldn’t even care about being rescued.

If you could say anything to your readers what would it be?

I’d say thank you. Without readers, a writer is a useless sort of person!