Young Authors

Today my husband and I volunteered to help staff book sale tables for Young Authors day at the college. This is an annual event that brings in about 20 children's and young adult authors, and hundreds of young kids, from adolescent to pre-teen, who have been selected by their teachers to come for the day. It might be a whole class of kids, or just a select group. The commonality among them is that they are all young readers and writers, all interested in reading and many of them knowing the authors that were brought in to speak that day.

I was utterly amazed as I stood in the college gymnasium as a seemingly endless stream of young people came filing in and made their way around the book-table-lined edge of the room. Each of them was gaze bound to the books stacked on the tables, excitedly running up to certain sections and grabbing up copies of the books, ooohhing and aaahhing at the hardcover editions of the paperbacks they either owned or could only afford. I listened in fascination as they turned to one another and launched into explaining why they loved this book or that book, how many times they had read it, and how many of that same author's books they had already read.

It was the simple move of one child that momentarily stunned me. It was a young girl, maybe 10 years old, who picked up a book, looked at the cover, then turned it over and stood, reading the entire back cover of the book before slowly flipping the pages and looking at the text on the pages. How utterly not worth even noticing such a gesture may seem, but what struck me was it was the sequence of an accomplished reader. How did this child learn to look at that cover, become interested, and know to turn it over and read the back to learn more? How did she then know to flip through the pages, and what, really, was she even looking for? Nothing in particular, as any reader who has done the same a thousand times can tell you, except that we look for a kind of "feel" to the book as we do so. How could she, at such a young age, have already become so discretionary about her reading? Was I like that at that age? I can't remember, but I'd like to think, given all the time I spent at the public library, all the books ordered from Scholastic, and all the summer reading clubs, that I would have been something like that.

And maybe that's why I was so struck by the image. Perhaps it was me I saw standing there; a me I have been so long removed from I had forgotten that's where I'd come from. But to see her there, I found a connection so deep in my memory that I was momentarily stilled by the impact of its having risen to the surface.

Later that morning, a young boy came up to me, paperback in hand, and asked me how he could tell if it was a first edition. Already a young collector. I opened the first pages and showed him the imprint page, then found a hardcover of the same book and showed him the difference, explaining how hardcover come out first and are the official first edition, then the paperbacks come out, but that those also go through editions, and he was holding the first edition paperback. Knowing, like most of the kids there, that he wasn't going to be able to afford the hardcover, he seemed pleased to have a first edition paperback.

The morning buzzed on, the gym filled with little bodies, occasional big bodies interacting with them, keeping them orderly, sharing in their excitement for books. I realized that these were a "select" group of kids, no doubt on their best behavior to be there at all, but still, there was such an incredible difference between that gym packed with hundreds of young people and how it feels when it is filled with adult bodies. These kids were such much nicer and quieter and more polite than any such large group of adults I had ever been around at a book event. They were there, not boasting about their own writing, their own accomplishments in publishing, or pushing something they wanted published, but they were there to see and to share in the secret, imaginative world their favorite authors had created for them. They were gentle with the books, kind to one another as they moved in hoards from table to table, waiting politely to be able to get in and pick up a copy of a book, and excitedly talking about wanting to chip in together to buy a copy for their teacher. They just took up a lot less space than adults, in so many ways, and in that moment, I felt such gratitude for this time in their lives. This smaller time.