From the July/August 2006 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

The Writer’s Page
Mostly

BY BRIAN DOYLE

hen I was a boy, my father sometimes sent me from our log cabin on the river to the neighboring farm to buy from the farmer lady two loaves of delicious freshly homemade “mostly raisin bread.”

I would arrive in time to see the hot brown loaves cooling on the sideboard and stay for a while to watch poor Mary, as they called her, punching up the dough and throwing in the handfuls of raisins for the next batch to go into the woodstove oven.

Then I would give her the two dimes for the two loaves and head home through the dark wood down the path, a loaf of warm mostly raisin bread wrapped in a towel under each arm.

There was a mystery to it.

Something missing.

And one day, after a number of warm trips to the farm that summer, I stopped on my way through the cool wood, startled by an epiphany.

The vision of poor Mary punching, kneading the white floury dough, the raisins thrown in — and the flies — hundreds of houseflies around the table and the bread dough, flying and darting among the raisins thrown . . . the flies! That was it!

That was why my father called it mostly raisin bread. Mostly! Some of the raisins were flies! Oh, my prophetic soul!

He never explained it. He let me figure it out. He allowed me to see. Eureka! That’s what it is! The wit of it. The art of it. A raisin — a fly! The beautiful horror of it. And it had been there the whole time. For me to discover. And because I discovered it, it now belonged to me!

And the method — the not-explaining, the waiting, the indirectness: it also now belonged to me. Down through the decades in my reading and teaching, and now writing for young people, I craved depth; I pursued imagery, suggestion, connotation, symbolism. Like life experience itself, the world we encounter doesn’t give itself up to us all at once. It’s often only later that we say, Oh yes, that’s what that meant to me, that’s the meaning of what happened to me last year. That’s the significance of what was said.

Recently, a young friend of mine wished to sign up at school for an extracurricular course in self-defense. He was being intimidated on his way to school and wanted a way to deal with it. His parents agreed to the idea and gave him twenty dollars to enroll in the course. On his way to school that day he was mugged and relieved of the twenty-dollar self-defense fee.

That very morning, in English class, the teacher conducted a short test, on which one of the questions was “What is irony?” Without hesitation my friend described his morning, having his self-defense money forcibly taken from him. “That’s irony,” he wrote on his test.

He got a zero for his answer.

The teacher wanted the following answer: “Irony: the incongruity of an outcome of events contrary to what was expected.” This is the same mindset that wants the “mostly raisin bread” trope explained and defined upfront, has a laugh about it, moves on, case closed. Only surface methods are to be employed when it comes to young minds, they say.

My publisher, Patsy Aldana, and I for the past three decades have held the opposite view. We have always thought that you should play Mozart to children before they know anything about Mozart. That you should go swimming before you can swim. That a five-foot line of poetry with an up and a down beat is pleasurable and meaningful long before you will ever identify it as iambic pentameter. That subtlety is seductive and not confusing, nor misleading. That depth is hypnotic, not dangerous. That irony is delicious, not a device reserved for the experienced and the educated and the widely read. That onomatopoeia is not merely the preserve of those majoring in English lit. That connotation is not over the heads of the young. That ellipsis and understatement are challenges for young readers and show respect for their intellects and do not, as the argument goes, encourage sloppy thinking or even evasiveness. In short, we have championed the devices generally to be considered “literary” as appropriate in the prose and poetry that we offer our youth.

And it is with this conviction that we fight those who would dumb down, talk down, water down, overexplain, oversimplify, pander, sentimentalize, conventionalize, compromise, condescend, go down roads much traveled, and, in general, show disrespect for the natural intelligence of our youth.

It’s been a good fight, and a worthwhile one and a rewarding one.

In closing, I quote from British author Martin Amis: “All writing is a campaign against clichés. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart.”

He said “all writing” — note that well!

Brian Doyle is the author of such acclaimed novels for children as Angel Square, Up to Low, Uncle Ronald, and Mary Ann Alice (all Groundwood). This article is adapted from his acceptance speech for the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature, delivered in October 2005 in Norman, Oklahoma.