Appreciation for storytellers

Selznick had spoken before about how much he had loved
As a child Remy Charlip's Fortunately.
About the revelations behind each page turn,
Like a series of doors opening,
And how this technique influenced his own work.
Selznick had spoken before about how much he had loved
Maurice Sendak's wild rumpus
And the wordless dance that allows us to become one
With Max and his Wild Things.
But that night Selznick spoke of a time five years ago when he felt stuck
And of meeting Maurice Sendak
And Sendak telling Selznick that he "showed promise
But [had] not yet done [his] best work."
"Make the book you want to make," Sendak told him.
And that night Selznick also spoke of meeting Remy Charlip,
And Charlip's resemblance to George Méliès,
And Charlip posing for the drawings of the filmmaker in Hugo Cabret.
And then he asked Remy Charlip to stand, present in the audience.
The real and the illusory merged,
As George Méliès stood in our midst.

Nina Lindsay, chair of the committee
that selected Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! took the mic next:
"Has a Newbery winner ever been shorter than the Caldecott winner?" she asked.
The audience laughed heartily but also perhaps a bit nervously, too.
How would Laura Amy Schlitz follow
The cinematic magic of Brian's words and pictures?
We silently rooted for her; we need not have worried.
Rejecting the podium, Laura Amy Schlitz,
In a shawl as blue as the ocean,
An exact match to the color of her eyes,
Stepped to the end of the table and seemed to fill the room, all 5' 2" of her.
She explained "Whenever I've dreamed, as writers do,
Of winning the Newbery, my dream has always ended
With the sad conclusion that I never would.
And then I've comforted myself:
Alright, I'll never win the Newbery,
But at least I won't have to give one of those speeches."
Having won, she reasoned,
"My friends, you deserve a good speech,
Something coherent and profound . . .
But . . . I have a storyteller's mind, a deranged junk drawer
Clogged with memories and metaphors.
I deal in mental pictures . . .
I brood over these images until I divine their stories."
To summarize her stories here would not do them justice.
But even to read her speech in print would not capture
The life she gives the stories when she tells them.
For you see, as she threaded together three anecdotes that "haunted" her,
Into tales involving "playground duty, a kite, and having moles removed,"
She did not read from typed pages, or even notes.
Laura Amy Schlitz had memorized every word,
Every hurried phrase, every pause.
For 17 minutes, we left Anaheim behind.
We were on a school playground with her,
Coaxing a frightened child to a soft landing.
We were in the woods, begging a bear to grant us our heart's desire,
And we were running on the beach, learning to fly a kite for the very first time.
Her gifts as a storyteller reminded us of the power of words fully inhabited.
She held us spellbound.

As we left the Anaheim Hilton
Across from a Disneyland now closed for the night,
We were engulfed by the profound silence that follows
The cries of children riding rollercoasters.
The quiet night sky became the backdrop to thoughts of
A child guided to a soft landing,
An imaginary bear in the deep woods,
A kite airborne above a salty ocean
A full moon illuminating the rooftops of Paris
And wait . . .
What was that?
The clipclop of hooves coming out of the mist?--Jennifer M. Brown

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