In William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55, the speaker describes the poem as “the living record of your memory.” That is, a person lives on forever because the memory of him or her is inscribed on the page. And not just any page, but the page in front of the reader, whether a four-hundred-year-old handwritten page or the mass-produced page of an anthology or the illuminated page of a website. On all these pages, the idea of the person lives. This is a testament to the power of the printed word–it defies death and time. It endures as a living record of memory.
I think a lot about memory and words. I think about traces that endure beyond their moment in time and carry the past into the present. I think about words that give memory shape. I think about the magical literary calculus by which we use words to measure and map our lives. These thoughts guide me as I read, as I teach, and as I write.
Memory is the central concern in my new middle-grade novel, THIS POWERFUL RHYME. In this book, my characters use words to remember, to understand, and to live with loss. They read Shakespeare’s sonnet and ponder how a poem can be a living record. They discover that while some words preserve, others destroy, and in all cases, words perform magic.
I write today in awe of the magic of these words: THIS POWERFUL RHYME has been sold to Clarion Books. I could tell lots of stories about this development–one is an epic tale of years of writing and rewriting, one is a practical account of queries and emails, one is a glowing recollection of the only warm March day accented with a necklace of colorful shoes. But these are stories about me, my jewelry, and my book.
The story I want to tell is the one about memory. That is the story the book itself demands. When THIS POWERFUL RHYME is out in the world, its story–about memory and powerful words–will live beyond me and beyond my moment in time. It will be a living record about memory and will remind readers to record their thoughts, their doubts, their hopes, and their rhymes. I don’t presume that my words will be as enduring as Shakespeare’s, but as his words live on my page, I hope my words will live on pages yet to come. I hope my words will guide readers in the business of shaping memory and measuring life.
And so it is that this story about memory turns out to be a story about the future, because THIS POWERFUL RHYME is only at the beginning of its journey out into the world, and in any case, what is memory but the past packaged and preserved so that it may journey with us as we travel onward.