Boston Globe-Horn Book Award Acceptance

AM LIKE Edward Tulane in that, on my journey, I have received more kindness than I actually deserve; so, if you don’t mind, I’d like to begin with the “thank-yous.” Thank you to the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award judges for bestowing this fabulous honor on the rabbit and me; thank you to Bagram Ibatoulline, for creating art that made Edward’s story deeper, richer, and more meaningful; thank you to designer Chris Paul, for shaping Edward’s journey into something magical and profound; thank you to editors Karen Lotz and Kara LaReau and everyone else at Candlewick Press for believing so passionately in Edward’s story.
I will never be able to say “thank you” enough.

But. Thank you.

I grew up in a small town in central Florida called Clermont. My mother, brother, and I moved there in 1968, before the arrival of Walt Disney World, when the town was a citrus farming community and the biggest tourist attraction for miles around was something called the Citrus Tower.

The Citrus Tower was white with red vertical stripes and stood twenty-two stories high; and at its base, there was a gift shop stocked with rubber alligators, canned sunshine, saltwater taffy, and orange blossom perfume. For fifty cents, you could ride an elevator to the crow’s-nest at the top of the tower; and when you stepped off the elevator and onto the observation deck, what you saw spread out before you were thousands and thousands of orange trees lined up side by side, one after the other, spanning the earth, stitching, it seemed, the whole world together.

The tower was so high that, on a clear day, you could see both the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, blue, green, and beckoning.

Our first year in Clermont, my brother and mother and I went up to the top of the Citrus Tower often. The crow’s-nest had windows that opened, and when my mother wasn’t looking my brother and I threw things out and down: super balls (to see how high they would bounce) and pennies (making wishes when we threw them) and marbles (hoping that they would crack open and reveal some great and beautiful mystery).

We spit, too, hoping, always, that our spit would land on the head of some unsuspecting person far below.

Sometimes, we pretended that we were being held prisoner in the tower. We stuck our arms out the open windows and waved them around and shouted, “Help us, help us, please!”
My hair, in those days, was cut short, and whenever we played prisoner-in-the-tower, I couldn’t help but think of Rapunzel. Looking down, I would feel a thump of alarm: how would I ever be able to grow my hair long enough for the prince to climb up it and rescue me? How would I ever, truly, get down?

But, always, no matter what, there was something amazing about being at the top of the tower: there was such a difference between the world as it was below, when I was in it, and the world as it looked from the tower, when I was above it.

It was the same world; I knew that.

But down below, on the ground, there was confusion and chaos: exhaust fumes, hot macadam, sticky vinyl car seats, shouts, arguments, disappointments, and the ache, always, of wondering where my father was and if and when he would come for us.

And from above, from the top of the tower, the world assumed a majesty and grace that I was not aware of when I was on the ground. All of those other things (the heat and exhaust and confusion and disappointment) were still there.

I knew it.

I did not, could not, forget them.

But those things were at a remove when I was at the top of the tower; and because of this, they became bearable.

From up high, I could see that there were patterns, and from those patterns, I intuited meaning. Something inside of me eased, shifted, when I looked down at the world. I was comforted in some way that I could not understand.

I have never asked my mother, but I’m assuming that she felt the same way and that it’s why she took us to the tower so often. We were, all of us, in search of comfort, perspective, hope.
And from up there, from on high, anything seemed possible.

I could even imagine my father, made small because of the great distance, dressed as he always was, in a dark suit and tie, walking through the orange groves, coming toward me, coming, finally, to join us.

In Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen tells a story that was told to her when she was a child. It goes like this: a farmer hears a noise in the middle of the night and goes outside to investigate. In the darkness, searching for the source of the noise, the farmer falls into a ditch, climbs out of it, stumbles over a stone, rights himself, runs along, falls into another ditch, climbs out. He goes to the north and to the south, to the east and the west; and finally, exhausted, he goes back to bed without ever discovering where the noise came from.

In the morning, the farmer looks down from his bedroom window and sees his footprints from the night before. The marks that he left as he stumbled and ran, lost, through the dark, have formed a pattern; they have traced the beautiful shape of a stork.

Sometimes, if we get up high enough, we can understand.

Sometimes, with enough distance, the pattern is clear.

Stories can give us that distance.

Stories, I think, are towers.

In particular, fairy tales are towers. They tell the truth. There is pain and suffering in the fairy tale, but because of the distance, because of the safe remove (“Now, this was a long time ago . . .”; “Long ago and far away . . .”), the pain and suffering become bearable. They become part of the pattern. In a fairy tale, life shifts, things come into focus; something inside the reader turns and opens.

Anything becomes possible.

I wrote The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane because I received a finely dressed rabbit doll as a Christmas gift; and soon after receiving him, I was struck by an image of the rabbit stripped of his finery, lying face down on the ocean floor, lost and waiting to be found.

I started the story with the magical word once, a word that immediately put me at the top of the tower, safe, at a distance, and able to see for miles and miles. And what I saw, as I wrote the story, what began to slowly emerge, was the shape of a heart.

The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane is, I think, a story about love. It is about learning how to open your heart over and over again, even when you know that it means your heart will break. It is a story about the light that is only able to enter us one way: through our broken hearts.

Not long ago, a friend asked me if I believe in what Edward Tulane promises, if I believe in the redemption that is available to all of us if we learn to love again and again and again.

There is a scene near the end of the movie Miracle on 34th Street when Natalie Wood’s character, who wants desperately to believe in Santa Claus but has every evidence that he does not exist, says over and over in a sad, monotone chant: “I believe, I believe, I believe.”

That is me.

I am that child: disbelieving, afraid, disenchanted, thinking that all the evidence adds up to a truth that I do not want; but still unwilling, ultimately, not to believe.

I am that child at the top of the tower, looking out over the wide and beautiful world; I am looking for my father.

And when I do not see him, I imagine him. I conjure him out of thin air. I insert him into the pattern.

I tell myself a story.

I believe. I believe. I believe.