Mystery and Magic of Story: A Spell That Connects One Heart to Another, The

Adapted from a presentation at the 2005 ALAN Workshop, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

A couple of months ago, I went home again. I moved back to northern New York State. To understand the significance of this, you need to know that I fled the region at age 18 at a full gallop. I vowed never, ever, ever, ever to return again.

And then God chuckled.

After a lifetime away, I moved home to marry my childhood sweetheart, a carpenter, and join him in the house he built on a hill covered with maple trees. Our home has too many books to count, a collection of oil lamps, and two fireplaces. This is a good thing because we average twenty feet of snow each winter. We often lose our electricity.

I love it when the power goes out. Scot lights the fires and I light the lamps. We sit close and watch the flames flicker. We talk, read-I write. If a bottle of wine is opened, we often end up singing. Thank goodness the neighbors live far away.

I don't like it quite as much if the power goes out when I'm alone. Coyotes run along the bottom of our hill yipping and calling. My German shepherd paces in front of the dark windows. The wind blows and the house creaks. I see ghosts in every corner and anxiously wait for the sound of the familiar truck engine that means my beloved is coming home.

The best thing to do when you are alone, in a storm, in the dark, is to watch the fire. Let the light dance for you, soothe you, warm you. The dark is a deep and scary place. It can seem without end or shape. That's why you have to concentrate on the light-the firelight, the lamp's flicker, the eyes of a loved one . . .

. . . or a book.

When an author moves to a new home, there is a shift in the Earth's tectonic plates. The accumulated weight of all of the books is staggering. Before I moved, I weeded my collection down to the bare minimum and made truckloads of donations to libraries and friends. Still, my stepson developed an impressive set of muscles hauling all those boxes up to my third floor office.

What didn't get weeded out were the letters. Like the other authors here, I get hundreds and hundreds of letters: assigned, unassigned, blog responses, and emails.

People are surprised to hear about the unassigned mail that pours in. Why would kids take the time to write to me if they don't have to do it for a grade?

If the letter comes from a sexual assault survivor, an outcast, or a depressed kid, usually, she read Speak. If it's a driven academic star who is burning out and frantically trying to hide it, she read Catalyst. If the writer is a teen who is not sure what the point of school is and what to do after graduation, he stumbled across Prom.

(One of my daughters has promised to create an online quiz: "Which Laurie Raise Anderson book are you?")

When the letters started coming in I was confused, too. Why were they writing to me? Why would any teenager write to an author?

It's quite simple. In story there is magic, words wound in a spell that mysteriously connects one heart to the next. Katherine Paterson says that literature "has a healing quality, a quality that enlarges our human spirits." She also says that "a great novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed."

There is magic on the page-words strung in sequence to create worlds that have loves and losses and bad jokes and truth and characters who feel alive. That magic works in the soul of a reader and helps focus him, helps him see the world a little clearer. The reader feels as close to the author as he does to his best friend, to the person who knows the secrets of his heart and still likes him.

I've gotten letters from every state, from England, from Germany, from Italy, and Slovenia. From jail cells. From houses that feel like jails. Many of these letter writers insist that they hate reading, that they hate books, and that my book was the first one they've finished since (fill in the blank) fourth, fifth, sixth grade.

These letter writers usually mention their teachers. Did you know that? They tell me about you, the teacher who assigns books that have meaning to students, who hands books to kids that are not part of the curriculum, who use their own money to replace the books that are stolen over and over again from their classroom collection. I get letters from the kids who pretend they're not listening.

Your best students, your most troubled students, and all the kids in-between are connecting to the literature that you are working so hard to share with them. You are passing along the light of our collective experience, our wisdom and magic. It's working.

If you are here today, you are a great teacher or you will be a great teacher. Not because you're smart, though you are. Not because you keep up-to-date with the latest research, though you do.

It's because you give a damn. You are not content to phone it in. You don't hide in the faculty lounge or your car during break. You give your all, you give every ounce of patience, honesty, hard work and discipline to your students. You leave each night as exhausted as a professional athletes because you leave it all on the field. Pro athletes only play 20, 30, 60 games a year. You play 185.