Waxing poetic

My daughter, who is 7 years old, has started writing poetry. This new interest seems to have grown from a poetry project in her first grade class, in honor of April being National Poetry Month and in preparation for the school’s upcoming Poetry Night.

There is a history of poetry here, of course. The White Mountains, and the forests and fields and villages around them, have inspired countless writers and poets, including Robert Frost, who lived for a time down the road from where I live now. My daughter’s recent poetry, not surprisingly, is inspired simply by the happy thoughts of a 7-year-old.

So far, she has waxed poetic about rabbits, dogs, cats, and the month of April. In one poem, she combined all of those things: April rabbits/April dogs/April cats/I love them all. Sometimes she writes her poems into big hearts she’s drawn on the page. She likes to use her new sparkly pen and write in her new sparkly notebook. She is a girl who loves to throw a little sparkle into everything she does.

Before my daughter wrote poems, she wrote books. These tended to center around seasonal themes – the bats and ghosts and witches of Halloween, the sand and seashells of a summer trip to the ocean. When she feels like writing, she sits down within the lively din that is nearly constant in our house, touches the end of her pencil (or pen) to the side of her mouth, opens to a new page, and just starts writing.

I love that my daughter writes. In this, she is like me. I have loved to put words on paper since I was old enough to climb the tall pine tree in the backyard of my childhood home and sit there with my notebook, surveying my world, thinking thoughts, writing some of them down.

In many other things, my daughter is quite different from me. She has, for instance, this confident sense of style that allows her to pair patterns and colors and textures that seem outlandish, but somehow work for her. While she struts like a fashion diva, I walk like a tomboy. Where she manages to always be fashionable – even on the soccer field or in the sand box – I can’t even manage to be fashionably late, preferring instead to be a few unfashionable minutes early to everything.

For the first two summers after my children were born, I worked as a docent at The Frost Place, that house just down the road where the great poet and his family lived nearly a century ago. It was there that I realized how powerful, and how meditative, poetry can be. I spent many a quiet afternoon reading Frost’s poems, his words strung together in timeless lines and stanzas. I already knew “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by heart and “The Road Not Taken” nearly as well.

In those summers, I discovered other Frost poems – “Revelation” and “Reluctance” among them – and other poets. One night, there was a reading with three contemporary poetry greats: Maxine Kumin, Galway Kinnell, and Donald Hall. I don’t remember which poems they read that summer evening, but I left Robert Frost’s old barn feeling both contemplative and euphoric. That is the power of poetry.  It is in song lyrics and music, in really well-written prose, in nursery rhymes and children’s books. It can be soulful or silly, graceful or gritty, straightforward or nuanced with hidden meaning.

The first lines I ever memorized came not from a poem, but from a famous passage in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” which I was required to learn for a high school English class. I remember the lines all these years later because they seem relevant now as they were when I was a teenager: “This above all: to thine own self be true,/And it must follow, as the night the day,/Thou canst not then be false to any man.” (There is a lot of other good stuff in that speech by Polonius, but I didn’t have to memorize all of it.)

Be who you are, and the rest falls into place. Those are good words to live by, I think, words I’d like my children to heed as they find their way in the world. I don’t know if my daughter will continue to write poetry, or if this is a fleeting interest. But I hope she’ll stay true to her sparkly, fashionable, confident self. And I hope she’ll always find a bit of poetry in her life.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings from a full life. This essay appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the April 11, 2014 edition of the Littleton Record.

The joys of reading

For as long as I can remember, I have loved books.

I have long relished peaceful summer afternoons filled by a compelling novel, chilly winter days nestled by the fireplace with something good to read, or the simple and comforting act of curling up with a bedtime story.

As a longtime reader, and now a writer, I am happy to get behind the local celebration this month of the National Education Association’s Read Across America program, which strives to instill in children a lifelong love of reading.

For the past decade I have worked as a writer, and so I am sometimes invited to serve as a speaker for various groups. This month I have been asked to speak at a local middle school about my work, and to read at a local elementary school during its Read Across America celebration. I consider these invitations an honor, and I hope the students find in books all the joy and knowledge there to discover.

The first stories I remember devouring were the Serendipity books – magical tales accompanied by fantastical drawings of doe-eyed animals and colorful fairy creatures. These were some of the first books I could read on my own, and I read one after another.

Eventually I graduated to the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, once spending an entire summer day in bed with a stack of compelling mysteries and consuming a large bag of M&Ms and four entire books. Later, it was on to Judy Bloom, V.C. Andrews, and the teenage drama of the Sweet Valley High series. 

Through the years I’ve embraced several favorite authors – John Irving, Tom Robbins, Barbara Kingsolver, Jodi Picoult – reading all the titles I could find by each in the local bookstore or the library. I’ve also gone through phases of reading the “classics,” from Charles Dickens and Mark Twain to Charlotte Bronte and Jane Austen. Occasionally I delve into the timeless poetry of Robert Frost (who for a few years lived and wrote just down the road from my home today), or the work of W.B. Yeats, Maya Angelou, and New Hampshire’s own Donald Hall.

Sometime into my 20s I discovered that E.B. White was not only the author of the beloved children’s book Charlotte’s Web, but also a masterful essayist, and I often return to a collection of his writing when I am between books.

With three young children, I now spend lots of time reading aloud – the zany rhyming tales by Dr. Seuss, the wonderfully silly poems of Shel Silverstein, the mischievous adventures of Curious George, and so many others. We’ve even started on some of the Serendipity books, resurrected from my childhood.

Like most parents, I hope that my kids grow up to cherish many of the things that I do. I’d love for them to play soccer and to find joy in the mountains, to travel to other places and explore close to home, to enjoy gardening and stargazing.

But the affection I most hope to pass on to them is the joy of reading. There is no other adventure that has the capacity to take us so far, to expand our horizons to new people and cultures, to carry us to other times and places.

There is nothing like being lost in the pages of a good book. Reading can take us Across America, and far beyond.

From the Record-Littleton, March 16, 2012.