Saunders’ thing.

Catholic-schooled, considered ‘slow’, coming of age in a shitty MN railroad town - reading (once I mastered the jigsaw of it and found the books to steal) was everything. In so many writers’ cliched childhoods, books were the preview to ‘out there’. Stories were tickets out of a small town dusted orange with taconite dust and taunted by the sounds of departing trains. In our church boys were routinely damaged. Skinny, homely, mildly dyslexic girls didn’t merit much attention, or abuse, thank Dog. The nuns were indifferent and incurious. We had poverty and faith, and while either can stunt, both at least gave face to what monsters to flee. In Proctor, MN during the 60s and 70s, the place itself suggested exit.

The boxcar I jumped was the library, where I discoverd a musty novel about a girl my own age who also had a drunk parent. Francie Nolan lived in Brooklyn, where her joys were small but exquisite, like mine. She had a fire escape, a peppermint stick and a view of her neighborhood with all its grit and characters. I had a dry bank at the edge of a wetland within sight of the roundhouse, where in summer a rug could be laid and tall grasses knotted overhead into a sort of cathedral. My own view beyond pond scum and fronds was trainsmoke, sky and clouds - the alleged heavens. Together, Francie and I sidestepped the coarse. Too skeptical for joy or promise, we sought the neutrality of the middle, where cracks sometimes gave way to allow - if not quite to dreams, at least possibility.

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn was the story I read at the exactly the right time and place, because if a girl as disadvantaged as Francie could have dreams, I could. She showed me the path to the possible, and eventually, to writing. Francie was fictional, made-up. If imagination can create such a thing as a friend... and a world for that friend to inhabit, then books seemed a good enough place to inhabit. I began to suspect authors must live the best lives of all, though it took me until 40 to understand that people who wrote books were not special in some way. A story only need be told. The telling doesn’t require a superpower or graduate degree, only craft and a ransom of imagination. Of all friends I ever had, Francie may have been the best. After launching as many novels as I am decades old, and writing dozens of bakers’ dozens of stories, I’m practically fiction myself.