Gary Schmidt, author of Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy and The Wednesday Wars, arrived at our school disheveled and disoriented after spending the night in O’Hare airport when thunderstorms delayed his flight.
Our middle schoolers were at the end of a second retreat day full of activities and expeditions. They had traveled to a camp where they swam in a frigid lake, kayaked and canoed, and participated in a ropes course, and other team-building exercises. Some of them had climbed a mountain, others had gone bowling, and a few had visited Haystack Observatory. Now they were all sitting in the Activities Center where we expected them to listen politely to a middle-aged author.
After I introduced him to the mass of swinging legs and squirming backsides, he hunched to the front of the room and began pacing, talking about a whale in the San Francisco Bay who was caught and being pulled down by the mass of flotsam he had collected on his body. Some intrepid rescuers rowed out to him in a small boat and began the painstaking process of freeing the whale, armed only with a knife. He continued with other stories—a baseball game in a small camp where a young man just wanted “one stupid single;” his real-life Wednesday war with his seventh-grade English teacher who was the inspiration for the character of Mrs. Baker in The Wednesday Wars; and the three-year process of writing Lizzie Bright.
I felt myself lean forward eager for the whale to be freed, exultant when the it returned to thank his rescuers, and I yearned for the young baseball player to get his hit. Suddenly, I realized that there was entire roomful of middle school kids doing the same. Gary had shed his fatigue and was exuding a magnetic energy, pulling us into the stories, the “what happened next” that he related is the trademark tool of the storyteller. The appendages that had been constantly in motion were now still. Giggles punctuated the silence when his real English teacher was yelled at by the principal in front of her solitary Wednesday afternoon student, and sighs and gasps erupted when the player ran circles in right field because he didn’t know where to go after he went to first base on his very first hit. This was the author who wrote: “Of all the kids in the seventh grade at Camillo Junior High, there was one kid that Mrs. Baker hated with heat whiter than the sun. Me” (The Wednesday Wars).
He explained that a writer will also write about something bigger than the story, leaving the reader with more questions. Lizzie Bright is based on the historical events centered in mid-coast Maine just after the turn of the century. The story was unearthed by Anne one summer when they went on vacation to the family home near Brunswick. The main character is a preacher’s son, Turner Ernest Buckminster III, who befriends a young African-American girl, Lizzie Bright. Lizzie lives in the community on Malaga Island, a piece of land the town fathers want to control because of its strategic location in a beautification plan for the town. The story involves issues of race, friendship, and growing up. One of the unforgettable characters, Mrs. Elia Hurd (based loosely on Emily Dickinson), says “So, Turner Buckminster III” she asked “when you look through the number at the end of your name, does it seem like you’re looking through prison bars?” When asked what the book was about after it had won a Newbery Award in 2005, Gary said: “It’s what I always write about: what it is that makes a child move from childhood to adulthood. It’s when a child starts to say, ‘this is my decision. I make this call.’ It’s the message a child has to get—that there’s a moment when you have to become your own person.”
After Gary finished and the students were dismissed, a crowd formed around him, adolescents and adults alike, clutching their copies of his books for him to sign. He graciously penned his name—about a hundred times—before following my husband and me out to our minivan where he and Anne climbed wearily into the middle seat. We drove back to the college where he was to speak again at a dinner, and he fell asleep while Anne and I talked quietly, she as a proud wife, brilliant in her own right, confident and content with her husband’s accomplishments, and I in the cathartic glow of inspiration.
After safely returning Gary and Anne for their evening activities, my husband and I returned to the school where I collected my books and our kids. We walked outside, passing an eighth-grade boy still dressed in the soccer uniform he wore for his afternoon game. In his hand, he gripped one of Gary’s autographed books.
“So, Derek,” I said, “Mr. Schmidt was pretty cool this afternoon, wasn’t he?”
“Ya!” His eyes lit up. “He was awesome, Mrs. Newell! I loved his stories! I wish he could have stayed longer. I want to read his other books.”
I looked at the boy’s eager face, and smiled.
“Me too, Derek!”
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