Corinna Stonewall has very kindly given me permission to open my speech with a quote from her, although she couldn’t resist pointing out that I am using one of her best lines.

“I’m queen of the world.”

This is how she describes herself on the first page of The Folk Keeper, and this is how I describe myself today.

There are not many ways in which Corinna and I are alike. I’m quickly chilled in water, for instance, and I stay clear of cellars, as they suggest spiders--spiders, and laundry. But I have to remember that Corinna is also a writer (I am actually rather envious of her power of The Last Word), and she has exactly described my feelings as I stand before you, accepting the Boston Globe-Horn Book award for fiction. Queen of the world. Many, many thanks to the judges who have honored my book in this incredible way, and I salute all the other kings and queens likewise honored this year. At the risk of over-extending this metaphor, I must also thank a prince of a guy, my husband, Richard Pettengill, who is sitting among you today. He always supported my writing, and he kept the faith during those many long unpublished years. Thank you, Richard!

Finally, this gives me a chance to salute the editor of The Folk Keeper, Jean Karl. Jean Karl, who is named in the dedication of The Folk Keeper; Jean Karl, who steered me clear of so many dangerous currents and deadly whirlpools in the writing of it; Jean Karl, who helped this story breathe on its own; Jean Karl, who died this spring, never knowing The Folk Keeper would win this award. An editor and author have a curious relationship. They may have an intense connection, but they don’t necessarily move in the same personal or even professional circles. That was true of my relationship with Jean, and so when she died, I didn’t have the opportunity to share my memories of her with the children’s book community. This, then, is my chance to celebrate her.

In order to tell the story of Jean’s contribution to The Folk Keeper, I need to tell the story behind the writing of it. And as I like to learn from good books, I will begin by borrowing a famous line from a longtime bestseller.

The story of my story begins like this:

In the beginning, there were no Folk.

I began, in 1993, with the idea for the complication of the story. I knew my heroine would be half selkie, half human; I knew she would be ignorant of her true nature. I knew something about her emotional journey, which would be a journey of self-discovery; and I knew something about her physical journey, which would be a journey from a mainland to an island. It would be on the island, I knew, that Corinna’s emotional and physical journeys would intersect. And when she discovered who she truly was, she would then have to decide how she wanted to live her life. As a human, mostly on the land, or as a selkie, mostly in the sea.

So I began, as do many traditional stories, with a journey. And the beginning worked well enough, for a journey provides its own energy. But when Corinna reached the island, the story ran out of steam. I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t realize that it was because there was nothing for Corinna to do! She drifted around inside the Manor, admiring the tapestries, looking at herself in the mirror. She drifted around outside the Manor, mooning over the sea, gazing at her reflection in the water. There was no narrative tension. That early Corinna stuffed the pages of her story not with action but with sea images. She was fond, for example, of comparing the sea to a variety of green gemstones--emerald, jade, beryl and the like. Well . . . what can I say? She was a typical, sentimental teenager.

I had wanted to create a strong heroine, but because I had deprived Corinna of the possibility of any action, her strength lay mostly in her being unpleasant. My writing group couldn’t stand her, and thought I should get her some therapy. I couldn’t stand her either, but since I was the one who had to live with her, I thought I should spend the money on therapy for myself.

At this stage, I was in touch with Jean in a general way about my manuscript, and once when I complained about Corinna, Jean said, “Maybe you should not shape her up too much. Characters should not run wild and move off in all sorts of directions that keep a plot from working. But they need to be themselves and do what they feel comfortable doing. Good characters come out of the subconscious and they live when they are allowed to be themselves. If you manipulate them too much they become puppets and not real people.”

But I didn’t know how to step out of the role of master puppeteer, how to let Corinna be herself. Finally, in a fit of desperation, I sent the manuscript to Jean. This was September, 1997. Her reply was characteristic, kind and incisive. “The main problem,” she said, “is that we don’t know what Corinna really wants. What does she want before she discovers she’s a Seal Maiden and has to decide where and how she’s going to live her life?”

Of course: Give your character something she wants! If Corinna wants something badly enough, she will act, act upon her environment, to get it. And her environment might respond in unpredictable ways, forcing her to act again.

Somehow, then, the idea of the Folk came to me, of the Folk and of making Corinna into a Folk Keeper. And it was then that I came up with my domino theory of writing, my realization that the elements of a story are like dominoes. If you line them up properly, you need only push the first and all the others will fall in their turn. So, in Corinna’s case, if she were an orphan--disenfranchised, marginalized--she’d be ravenous for power. If she were ravenous for power, she’d do anything to be a Folk Keeper, the only job within her reach that might give her a measure of power. If she wanted so much to be a Folk Keeper, she would cleave desperately to the position, even on the rocky island of Cliffsend, where the Folk were especially fierce and savage. If the Folk were especially fierce and savage . . . Well, the possibilities for drama, tension, and action were endless, each domino knocking over the next.

Once Corinna knew what she wanted, she started to drive the story. She started to speak inside my skull. Loudly. “This is my story and my Folk Record!” she said. “The sea is a savage, muscular thing, powerful, as I am. It is no green jewel. Get all those images out of here!”

And I did, mostly. I left just a few, because she didn’t say, Please!
I wrote four drafts with Jean after the novel turned into The Folk Keeper; that took ten months. Jean was kind and incisive, and something else, too. She was trusting. Often, for example, I failed to line up my dominoes properly, and after the story came clattering by, there would be a bunch of them still standing. And would I sweep them away? Oh, no: I’d tug the story in bizarre directions to make them fall over. But Jean trusted her writers, and she never told me which dominoes were distorting my storyline. She let me discover them myself, saying, “The whole could still be cut. Read through it and think about words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs that are not wholly needed. You need to pull it all together, keep the action moving and the direction of that action clear.”

Not wholly needed. And so I took out an exquisite green marble tower. It had leaded-glass windows, overlooking the sea. That was a bleak day in the Billingsley-Pettengill household. And at the risk of reducing a roomful of librarians to tears, I must tell you that I took out the library at Marblehaugh Park, with its wrought-iron spiral stairs and second-floor gallery lined with books. Two thousand volumes, gone with a swipe of my pen.

I thought I understood the basic principle of novel writing when I came up with my domino theory (which I now realize is not original to me at all). But over those last months of revision, Jean led me to see that the domino theory, while true, isn’t all of the truth. A novel is really more like a web, a spider’s web, which is made of pure protein. It took me a long time to understand what Jean meant when she said things like, “Think about cause and effect, reasons for events, the network that binds every sentence and paragraph into a seamless whole.” The network, she said. A web. A novel is not linear, but a weave of interconnected filaments.

So, Jean was kind, incisive, trusting . . . and relentless! Five weeks before the final manuscript was due, she asked, “How does the end fulfill the beginning? At the start, Corinna is content with being a Folk Keeper and wants to stay on. She accepts the change [going to Cliffsend] because she can be a more powerful Folk Keeper. But is this enough? Or is her search for the missing part of herself important, and when she discovers what it is that is missing, and what it means in terms of life choices, is that what matters? Is this a story of Corinna finding herself? In other words, what is the underlying thread that binds the whole and makes it more than a sequence of events?”

A novel is more than a sequence of events, more than a line of dominoes. How could I weave those filaments together, threading the ending back into the beginning? The solution grew organically from what I’d already set in motion. I had already made Corinna a writer; I had already given her the power of The Last Word. I could weave that strand into the end. When Corinna hovers between land and sea, forced to choose between them, she must learn that she will lose her words if she chooses life as a selkie, and she must realize that words are part of what makes her who she is and that she cannot give them up.

I am wonderfully lucky to have begun my writing career with Jean Karl. I have a new editor now, and again, I am wonderfully lucky. I am working with Dick Jackson. After just a few conversations with him about my newest manuscript, I already know that he is kind, incisive, and trusting. I do not yet know whether he is relentless, but I suspect that he is! My new manuscript now sprawls over more than 400 pages and resembles nothing so much as a line of dominoes after an earthquake. I know that in order to make it sing, I need to find the boundaries in which it is contained. I’ll do it with Dick’s help, but I’ll let Jean explain what I mean. She had her own power over words, and today, in this community of children’s book lovers, she shall have The Last Word. “You need to find the limits,” she said. “It is a sense of the limits within which the story must rest that creates the bounds and the possibilities for a contained and complete work that resonates with life.”

October 2, 2000