Avi

Thankful

One of the par­tic­u­lar joys of writ­ing for kids is that they write to you. Some, to be sure, are teacher / school assign­ments, but that doesn’t reduce their own young voic­es. Then there is the young read­er who has felt a par­tic­u­lar con­nec­tion to me and one of my books and shares self and point of view in a very per­son­al manner.

The envelopes that con­tain their let­ters are often fan­ci­ful­ly dec­o­rat­ed, along with mes­sages on the out­side. “Read me!” “Open me!” “Write back PLEASE!”

Depend­ing on the hand­writ­ing, if it is hand­writ­ten, I often can guess the age of my reader.

It’s pret­ty rare, but now and again the young writer will tell me that he or she did not like a book. I’m inter­est­ed and appre­cia­tive of those thoughts too.

And then there are ques­tions. Every­thing from how old I am to why do I write books. Where do I get my ideas? How long does it take to write a book? Which is my favorite of my own books? Which is my favorite of all books? And on and on.

There are those let­ters that tell me I have changed their lives, or their ideas, or feel­ings about read­ing. There are those who tell me that they just enjoyed my book.

I answer every let­ter and try to answer their questions.

And then there are the let­ters from peo­ple who were once kids. Adults who now remem­ber a par­tic­u­lar book. Or they share a par­tic­u­lar book with their own chil­dren. There are the librar­i­ans and teach­ers who have shared my books for many years with their students.

The point of all this is that I am noth­ing with­out my read­ers. To speak metaphor­i­cal­ly, my book is one hand, the read­er is anoth­er, and when they come togeth­er there is a joy­ful noise. It’s not applause. It is the sound of a human con­nec­tion found in one of my stories.

How thank­ful I am for all of that.

Avi