Lois Lowry's Blog

Last weekend I was over on the coast of Maine, visiting my friend Middy, and she and I went to The Gallery at Widgeon Cove in Harpswell, home and gallery of very gifted artists Condon and Georgeann Kuhl.  Here's a snapshot of the view from their front garden, and another of the pendant made by Condon which I bought. Their website is http://www.widgeoncove.com/

Yesterday---Sunday----we took the grandsons, 7 and 9, up to the top of Mt. Washington in New Hampshire by the steam-and-coal operated cog railway.  Mt, Washington, at 6000+ feet, is the highest mountain east of the Mississippi and has a reputation for brutal weather in winter. My friend Monroe Couper, a composer who shared a residency with me (and others) at the MacDowell Colony in 1980-81, died on Mt. Washington in the winter of 1994---froze to death when climbing in terrible weather. But on a summer day it seems benign, even at the top, and the view over the Presidential Range is spectacular.From our property in Maine we can see it, in clear weather, in the distance: snow-capped through June, usually.  One startling thing yesterday was that our train car contained several Hassidic families, the little boys with their side curls, mothers with their heads covered...fathers with beards, black suits, and fringed prayer shawls over their shirts and under their vests.  In addition...and very startling...was an Elvis impersonator. All of this made a mountaineering expedition seem a bit like a Fellini movie. I kept expecting nuns and dwarves to show up.

Because I was off on the mountain trip, I did not hear the NPR interview with me that was on yesterday but I heard this morning from a number of listeners. They did a nice job of editing (I listened to it this morning by going to the NPR website) but took out the funny dispute Liane Hanson and I had about the pronunciation of "wizened."

A couple of years ago I planted wildflower seeds across the border between my mowed lawn and my meadow..

This morning I answered an email from a teacher who is about to start using "Number the Stars" with a group of boys and wondered if I had any additional information that would enhance the experience for them.  I suggested that he? she? (can't remember) research Kim Malthe-Bruun, the young resistance fighter who was executed in Denmark by the Nazis, and who was the model for Peter in the book.

(1) Kim Malthe-Bruun, letter to Hanne about his experiences of being tortured by the Gestapo (3rd March, 1945)

My friend, writer Kathryn Lasky, lives in Cambridge, as I do, and summers in Maine, as I do, but quite a distance from me.  Recently she emailed me a photo of a piece of sculpture made of found objects - created by a sculptor who lives near her in Deer Isle.  Kathy is the author of the owl series: The Guardians of Ga'Hoole (which I may have spelled wrong, Sorry, Kathy) so her owl sculpture is quite appropriate.

I am not the author of anything having to do with sheep. But I do love that kind of folk-art stuff; and so I went to the sculptor's website and ended up buying a sheep made from an oil can and some flattened auto parts. When I told Kathy she insisted that i need TWO sheep because ... well, just because. And I obeyed. Or maybe I obaaaa-ed.

So now I have a pair of sheep on their way to me here.

I was actually up in Kathy's part of Maine, or close to it, over the weekend when I signed books at Left Bank Books in Searsport...a wonderful bookstore  way up the coast.  On the way home, I stopped overnight in Brunswick, Maine, to visit my friend Middy, who illustrates the Gooney Bird Greene books. Middy does not have an owl or a sheep in her garden, but she does have a wonderful garden:

Now I am back home after the weekend, and at work on some manuscript revisions (too soon to talk about that book yet) and when i take a break from work at the computer, I am snipping off the over-the-hill peonies, hundreds of them, lining my driveway.  Alfie is sound asleep, having exhausted himself at a kennel over the weekend (How? not a clue. He was just in a pen all by himself)

My brother has an African Gray Parrot. Don't ask me why. Every now and then he sends me Parrot News. The most recent:

Freda (my brother's wife) came home alone after dark one night. As she entered, she heard an unfamiliar man's baritone say  "Who IS it?" twice.
She was terrified. Until Kuzo laughed at her from the bedroom.  

Pileated woodpecker in the apple tree.  Evening grosbeak on the bird feeder.  Two wild turkeys just strutting around. An average day.

Now that I am back from New York, the play is off and running and in the hands of the two directors, Stan Foote in Oregon and Jeff Frank in Milwaukee  This morning Jeff sent me sketches of set design and costumes..all of the behind-the-scenes, before-the-show stuff is so interesting!  The final readings in New York went smoothly and the audiences at the three performances had lots of comments. Me, I can see how it begins to come together and jumps off the page and into a whole other realm.  I'll see the final version in its opening in Milwaukee September 19th, and then...different version...in Portland in late October.

This evening I will go to a party down the road, for people who have donated to the little town library. Little, but lively and wonderful, and such a vital resource for the people of this small town year-round, not just us summer folk!  Here it is, in all its splendor!

Well, this is irreverent, I know.  But I am picturing an interview show in the afterlife, with host Tim Russert having two guests: Tasha Tudor and George Carlin.

Someone has just alerted me to the fact that there is a band in North Carolina called "Jonas Sees in Color,"  their name inspired by The Giver .   Attached, a photo of the band, looking not at all like members of The Community!

I am still in New York, still in the apartment that NYU has made available to me in a high rise building in Greenwich Village. My apartment is on the 13th floor.

Coming back to my temporary apartment in Greenwich Village last night after the play rehearsal, I passed a sports bar that was open to the street...inside everyone was watching the Celtics/Lakers game; I was able to stop and see that the good guys were ahead. I was too tired to stay up for the end of the game but in the morning there was a text message on my cell from my son:  YES!  it said; so I knew the Celtics had won.

How weird is THAT?!

Last night (Sunday) was the evening that began the workshopping-of-Gossamer-the-Play. If I can successfully move the snapshot from my cell phone to this site, you will see a group of actors sitting around a table, along with me (playwright), Stan (director) and Cecily (dramaturg). First, the entire play was read straight through, with very few interruptions (although Actors Equity requires a ten minute break every hour and twenty minutes) and then it was read a second time, (but without the stage directions being read this time) with the director  stopping things now and then for (sometimes lengthy) discussion about a particular character, or the relationship between characters in a scene, how the characters were evolving, or what exactly we were trying to do, with a bit of dialogue. There was some trying things different ways, some experimentation.  My role was mostly listening, and I did that with enormous interest and appreciation for the hard work everyone else was putting into it..

The actors provided sound effects, sometimes hilariously...those things will all be done by the sound technicians when the play is actually produced, of course.  We had a pretty good owl hoot, though, a lot of loud heavy breathing when necessary, some not-too-great horse whinnies, and a terrific woof-and-whine dog.

I spent yesterday afternoon on the island where i lived when I was 15, 16, and 17 years old...  It was a very hot day- and I was going on from there to dinner and the theater -  so I didn't want to have a camera dangling around my neck; but I wish I had been able to take better pictures.  This is just a snapshot with my cell phone, of the house where I lived....but what you can't see is that from the windows in the back of the house, you looked out to the water of New York Harbor, and beyond it to the skyline of Manhattan, a 7-minute boat ride (one I took each morning to school) away.

It was an incredible place to live and it was very nostalgic, being back there.  It is now a national park, open to the public in summer, free boat rides over, and bike rentals available on the island.  People were picnicking on what had once been my front lawn. ( In the 50's, when I lived there, no non-authorized people were allowed on the island. We who lived there had special passes that we carried and had to show to the military police  when we went back and forth.)

I couldn't get a very good scan, unfortunate]y, of this new paperback book cover for MESSENGER; it goes with the two previous in the trilogy, in their adult versions...by which I mean intended to be in the adult, vs. the young-adult, sections of bookstores.  I like these covers; the first is green, the second blue, and this third one is brownish red...(it appears much redder in this scan)... each of them with two artfully-posed hands. I think they're quite evocative.

 Tomorrow morning I leave for New York, and on Saturday I will be speaking informally on Governors Island, down off the lower tip of Manhattan...the island where I lived when I was 15, 16, and 17. In those days the island was occupied by the US Army; now the buildings remain, some of them quite historic; but the island itself has been given back to the city of New York and will become a park. Tour groups are beginning to be allowed over there, and I'll just be describing what it was like to grow up on such an amazing piece of real estate.

It will be fascinating to see my big old house, though I understand the houses, once elegant, are becoming quite derelict and will probably be torn down.  

My little brother Jon attended elementary school on the island but those of us past 8th grade had to go each morning by boat to Manhattan and from there make our ways to the various schools we attended.  Many kids went by a second boat to a public high school on Staten Island, some by subway uptown to private schools like Spence or Collegiate; and me by train to Brooklyn Heights to a private school for girls called Packer (which now has for many years also had male students)  Others of my island friends went to boarding schools. It was a wonderful place to live and I don't think I appreciated how lucky I was at the time.

In my memoir called "Looking Back" there is this photograph of me in a white dress, 17 years old, the day I graduated from Packer in 1954; it was taken on the lawn of the house on Governors Island.  I've not been back to the island since I went off to college that fall. My parents moved to Washington DC while I was a freshman at Brown.  

Then for the next week, in New York,  I will be working with the cast and director and dramaturg for the stage production of "Gossamer"    You can go to the website for Oregon Childrens Theatre...www.octc.org.... and read about their plans for the play, or to http://www.firststage.org for the First Stage in Milwaukee, which will also produce Gossamer in the fall.

Red Sox at 6:05 tonight. Dinner in front of the TV, I think. 

After a week of cool rainy weather...followed by a couple of hot sunny days...the gardens have flung themselves into summer. And wouldn't you know it, I have to leave Maine Wednesday, day after tomorrow, for ten days.

Alfie has been having a wonderful vacation (there he is peeking from behind a bush) with various company...which he loves...coming and going (no visiting dogs this time, alas).

By the time I return, there will be plenty of other things in bloom but I do hate to say goodbye to the peonies and lupine be cause they will be gone when I return.

My friend Nancy was here for the weekend and being an organized person, she sorted out all of my spices...threw away everything with overdue expiration dates...and alphabetized them. Is that a great friend, or what?!

I am now back in Maine...for the summer, though I have large chunks of interrupted Maine time coming up...and was pleased to see the gardens looking beautiful (thanks, Lucia, master gardener) and my new bathroom looking great (thanks, Dan and Darel, master remodelers) and my little town here starting to rev up for summer tourists.  I stopped in the local bookstore, always one of my first stops, and though neither Justin nor Pam (the owners) were there, I look forward to seeing them soon. In the meantime, I bought a book on Saturday which I have just finished, (on Tuesday, despite having had company here)....and am recommending it highly: "The Blood of Flowers" by Anita Amirrezvani.  Yet if someone had said to me: "Want to read a book about 17th century Persia?" I probably would have said (politely, of course): "Ah, no thanks."  But I would have been wrong.

It is a moving and luminous portrait of a lost culture, and a reminder that the real tenets of Islam have little to do with today's terrorists who have co-opted that religion.

Here is Alfie, supervising the set-up of a treadmill in my studio in Maine. I have one in Cambridge but soon will move up to Maine for the summer and need to continue trudging away. My friend Kay has convinced (make that coerced) me to go with her in January to a place that I am thinking of as Torture Resort (see website: http://www.theashram.com) so I have to prepare myself. Kay doesn't need to; Kay is always prepared! As I speak she is leaving for Peru to hike the Inca Trail; and she spends time each day at the gym, or rowing on the Charles River, but only of course when she is not off trekking the tundra of northern Canada.

The childish part of me (my main component part, actually) would like to say, of Kay, "Well, nyah, nyah, she can't write a book!" but the fact is she is in the middle of writing a book right now, while she is on sabattical from her teaching chores at Harvard.

The treadmill allows me to prop up my Kindle and read while treading, and I have just finished Barbara Walters' much-publicized memoir. In it she mentions a question she sometimes asks during interviews: 'What do you think is the biggest misconception that people hold about you?' So I have been thinking about that, and mentioned it to Martin (who arrived here yesterday) over a glass of wine last night. I told him that my first response was "that I am well-organized."

Then, after a second, I said, "But I am pretty well-organized, actually," and he agreed.

Here is Darel. As I am out in the studio trying to create a new book, Darel is on the second floor of my house trying to create a new bathroom.

And he's doing a great job.