Lois Lowry’s Keynote Speech on April 6, 2008 in Flint, MI
Lois Lowry is an entertaining speaker. She makes abundant use of interesting visual aids (photos of herself and family, her book covers, etc) and she isn’t afraid to produce a laugh or two from her audience.
Lois Lowry was born in Hawaii of Norwegian descent, went to Brown on a scholarship then dropped out to get married and raise children. She began writing again in the mid 1970’s, fulfilling her childhood dream. She currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She has written 35 books for children. And I am glad she has, we have enjoyed many of them.
Her mother read The Yearling to her when she was eight-years-old and this changed her literate life. She recently spoke about the impact Rawlings’s book had on her with NPR (but I could not find this on their site). The Yearling is one of my childhood favorites and my ten-year-old is now inspired to read it herself.
Lois Lowry said she was a shy and introspective child, often making up stories. She was first published at the age of ten with a letter to Jack & Jill magazine about her family. The publication of this letter caused her anxiety for she was away at camp and had entertained the teenage girl camp counselors with tales of her imaginary handsome brother away at college. Oh, what would she do if one of the girls at camp got the magazine and read the letter to everyone?
The Giver is Lowry’s bestselling book. It is part of a trilogy with Gathering Blue and Messenger. If you buy the Scholastic edition that is a boxed set of all three, you get maps of the worlds she created in the trilogy, drawn by her. Climate control is NOT practiced by all the communities. Jonas does ride his bicycle outside of the controlled climate to a community that does not practice that.
Jonas and Gabriel are not dead in the end of The Giver and she purposely left it ambiguous but uses the following two books to answer some of the questions left in the end of The Giver. Baby Gabriel is mentioned again on page 17 of Messenger and she is currently contemplating writing a fourth book with Gabriel as the main character. The last two pages of Gathering Blue answer some of the questions but she only refers to Jonas and Gabriel as the boys with light eyes. Another interesting tidbit is that the photographs used on the trilogy’s covers along with the photo on the cover of Number the Stars were taken by Lowry.
If the loss of color sight is caused by genetic modifications to the humans in this community, the play countered that theory by having The Giver state that he was losing his ability to see colors as he gave Jonas the memories. I thought this was true to the book also, but have not searched through it again. It is the keeping of memories inside of us which is pivotal to being able to see color and hear music and feel love. I like this story but I think it is best not to ask very deep questions about what happens in it. Lowry never expected to write science fiction, never read science fiction and my impression is that she still doesn’t. This is interesting to me as I struggle writing my own work of science fiction in which I am constantly striving to live up to Orson Scott Card’s commands that we know the answers to the questions our story evokes. This is why Ender’s Game is top-notch science fiction, it all makes sense and this is why I worry about my own. This is why I spend so much time thinking through my work.
Lowry spent most of the speech explaining where the idea for The Giver came from. I think she gets this question so frequently because of the ambiguities and vagaries in the story. We as the reader want to make sense of something we cannot and so we ask her, What were you thinking about that inspired this story?
The idea for The Giver came to her when visiting her father in a nursing home. He kept forgetting that his daughter, Lowry’s older sister, had died and when she relayed the story to him again and again, his reaction every time was one of intense pain and sorrow. She began to wonder what would it be like if we could manipulate human memory? Especially troubling or frightening memories. And this is what the people in The Giver set out to do - a communal repression of memory.
Lowry also relayed to us that The Giver also speaks about the fear of differences amongst us and how that fear keeps us from each other. After World War II, her Army dentist father accepted a position in Tokyo Japan to set up dental services. Lowry was eleven at the time they moved there and was extremely disappointed when they moved into a recreated American village in Tokyo rather than amongst the Japanese people. So, she rode her bicycle around the streets of Tokyo, wanting to interact with the Japanese but afraid to because of their differences. We can make ourselves feel more comfortable and safe when we don’t expose ourselves to anyone different.
This reminded me of the three years I spent, the same ages as Lowry, living in Sao Paulo, Brazil with my family. My father worked for GM-Detroit Diesel and was transferred to start DDA in Brazil. I loved it and was often mistaken for a Brazilian, but my mother and brother had a more difficult time. I still crave seeing new places and meeting different people.
Two of Lowry’s books are autobiographical: A Summer to Die and Autumn Street. A Summer to Die is based on the loss of her older sister when she was still young. The main character in the Gooney Bird books, which my daughter really enjoys, is the kind of girl Lowry always wanted to be - confident. Lowry skipped second grade and this is her way to revisit what she missed.
Lowry’s books start for her with a character, place and something mysterious going on. In most cases, she knows the ending before she writes and she feels that titles are difficult to write. Titles should be easy to remember and tell something about the story without giving it all away.
The production of The Giver by the Flint Youth Theatre followed the keynote speech and we were encouraged to get our books autographed after the play as many in the audience weren’t partaking in both.
We enjoyed the play, the young man Ian Guevara who played Jonas was especially good as was Garrett Markgraf who played Asher. We had the pleasure of sitting with some of Ian and Garrett’s family at the dinner following the play.
I did have a problem with some of the set of The Giver. Actors dressed entirely in black holding artificial heads upon sticks came out in every scene and stood in the corners of the open round circle set, but they stood in front of us and we often couldn’t see the main scene.
So, when the play ended my daughter ran out and got in line to have her copy of The Giver autographed.
