RICH, POETIC LANGUAGE: A Season of Gifts

Dear Allyson,

Happy Monday morning to you. I hope you and your family had a magical and beautiful Christmas. Today we wrap up our discussion about A Season of Gifts, and I wanted to focus on the book’s rich language.

The storyteller voice of A Season of Gifts, complete with characters’ grammatically incorrect dialogue, slang, and clichéd metaphors, makes the book an easy read. And yet underneath its casual and chatty tone lies a wealth of examples of rich, poetic language.

Let’s start with word choice. Every writing class I’ve ever taken says to use active verbs. Richard Peck puts verbs to work in A Season of Gifts:

Seethed. Peppered. Slumped. Nuked. Plunked. Teetered. Hoisted. Drifted. Flinched. Billowed. Quivered. Inventoried. Craned. Veered.

Even out of context, don’t these words create vivid images of specific types of action?

Peck also gets the most out of nouns, creating texture by focusing on specific descriptive details. After Thanksgiving, for example, Mrs. Dowdel gets busy baking for Christmas:

Her kitchen was stacked to the ceiling with black walnut fudge, candied orange peel, Linzertorte, sugar cookies in shape, pfeffernuss, gingerbread people, spingerle, brandy snaps, heavenly hash, popcorn balls, glazed chestnuts, and some fifty pounds of peanut brittle rolled out on a marble top from one of her front room tables.

Wow! This list conveys Mrs. Dowdel’s enthusiasm for Christmas, her ambition, and her energy. It even hints at her cultural background (Linzertorte, pfeffernuss and springerle).

Words aren’t just workhorses, though. Peck also plays with words and language. The double-meanings and word sounds of puns lighten the mood and provide humor. Early in the book, Bob meets the town thugs after a day helping his father fix up the church.

“You smell funny, preacher’s kid,” said another voice from on high. And he should talk. “What’s that you smell like?”

“Shellac,” I said in a puny voice. “I’ve been shellacking a pew.”

“Pew. You can say that again,” said another voice, and they all did a lot of hee-haw laughing (p. 19)

Taking a step away from individual word choice, we can look at how Peck crafts sentences. Sometimes, as with the list of cookies above, he uses long sentences. Sometimes, he shifts into staccato mode. Here’s an example from the Christmas Eve church service at the end of the book:

Brad and I were at the back, flanking the door when it banged open. Wind blew in. Candles blew out. People jumped. Brad and I fell back. An enormous figure filled the door—bear big. “Hit the lights,” it said (p. 153).

The short sentences keep the action coming. Peck stays in the moment, paying attention to every detail, and by doing so, he builds tension for the reader. What’s happening? Who’s there?

Varying the length of sentences affects how they sound. Another way Peck manipulates sound is through alliteration. “White cold cream clung in all the crevices of her face” (p. 94). All of those hard C sounds stick in the back of my throat, just as the cream sticks to Cora Shellenberger’s face.

As with puns and word choice, Peck also plays with sentence structure to create moments of humor. Several examples occur when Mrs. Dowdel tells Mr. Barhnart that every church needs a good funeral to build followers.

“Without a funeral, you ain’t got a chance in—“

“The world,” Mrs. Wilcox said (p. 71).

Then, on the next page, Mrs. Wilcox explains her desire to bury the Kickapoo Princess.

“I’m sick to death of all this fussin’ and fumin’ about restless spirits and floatin’ princesses and such horse—“

“Feathers,” Mrs. Wilcox said (p. 72).

The interrupted sentence, marked by the dash, clearly implies what Mrs. Dowdel would like to say, while Mrs. Wilcox provides comic relief and prevents the need for a cursing.

The sentences throughout the novel read easily, but Peck clearly paid attention to crafting them for maximum impact, sound, and meaning. This same attention shows on a larger scale in the work. For example, Peck repeats details periodically for an effect that is similar to a refrain in a song. At the beginning of the book, little sister Ruth Ann worries that “he” won’t find her in their new home. Bob, the narrator, doesn’t understand who “he” is. “'S-A-N-T-A,' Phyllis spelled, 'C-L-A-U-S'” (p. 37).

At the end of the book, Ruth Ann sulks, upset that Mrs. Dowdel treats her like a little kid, worrying for Ruth Ann that “he” will look for her in their old home.

“Who, honey?” Dad said.

“You know who, Daddy. S-A-N-T-A,” Ruth Ann spelled, “C-L-A-U-S” (p. 132).

Repetition of details such as this unify the story. They help us remember who Ruth Ann is. When well done, such as this example, repetition can also reveal change. Not only does Ruth Ann know the truth about Santa now, but she can spell his name too.

While looking at the larger scale of the book, I also want to mention section breaks and chapter endings. Peck takes advantage of line and space to emphasize dialogue, build tension, and create hooks to the next chapters. In Chapter Ten, Bob, his parents, and Mrs. Dowdel race to the Shellenbergers to care for Phyllis, who was in a car crash after a night out with bad-boy Roscoe Burdick. Mrs. Dowdel sniffs Phyllis’ breath.

She pointed past us at Phyllis, growing smaller on the settee. “She’s had one too many.” 

Silence fell hard. The mantlepiece clock ticked off several slow seconds (p. 97).  

Notice how the visual space of the section break creates the very silence that Bob experienced.

What I find fascinating about A Season of Gifts is that while reading it, I feel like I’m in the presence of a storyteller. It feels so easy, so conversational. Effortless. The book feels like it should be read aloud. And yet, clearly, Peck worked hard to create that feeling.

Then, when I looked at the general groupings I made in my notes about language, I started to think about poetry. Word choice. Sentence length. Alliteration. Word play. Repetition. Line breaks. Tone. I could flip through A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver and find those very topics.

The gift I take away from reading Richard Peck’s novel is a greater awareness of how poetic language enriches fiction, allowing the casual reader to experience the book as effortless while rewarding careful readers with the treasure of beautiful language.

StorySleuths Tip #36: Pay attention to language on every level, from word choices and sentence structures to sections and chapters. Don’t be afraid to include poetic language and rich imagery.

STORY CHOICES: A Season of Gifts

Dear Allyson,

You brought up Mrs. Dowdel in your post about characters in A Season of Gifts. I can’t agree more with your assessment that actions speak louder than words: in everything she does, Mrs. Dowdel proves that she is larger than life.

Unfortunately, some of the actions of this fictional character have resulted in a real-world controversy. I know that the goal of StorySleuths is to find examples of great writing techniques in hopes of improving our own writing. However, I feel I must take a step away from craft to draw attention to something that gives most writers nightmares: the potential of inadvertently offending people through our writing.

The bloggers and readers over at School Library Journal’s Heavy Medal, a Mock Newbery blog, have been debating just such an issue in A Season of Gifts. The issue relates to a rumor about a Kickapoo Indian ghost.

Let’s start with what happens in the book (spoiler alert!):

• Rumors circulate that a Kickapoo Indian ghost haunts Mrs. Dowdel’s property, which was built on an ancient burial ground.
• When a group of teenage girls tries to steal squashes from Mrs. Dowdel, a ghost, wearing beaded moccasins and a feathered headdress, appears.
• Bob, the narrator, realizes that his little sister Ruth Ann played the part of the ghost in Mrs. Dowdel’s charade.
• Mrs. Dowdel profits from the ensuing excitement and publicity about the Kickapoo Princess ghost by setting up a roadside stand to sell her melons, preserves, and crafts.
• A few days later, Mrs. Dowdel decides it’s time to put the Kickapoo Princess rumor to rest (pun intended). She comes to Bob’s father, pastor of the new and struggling Methodist church, with a box of “bones” and a request for a funeral.

Mrs. Dowdel says, “’You can’t get a church up and goin’ without a good funeral first… Any fool could tell you that. Without a funeral, you ain’t got a chance…’” She explains that she’s tired of the “’fussin’ and fumin’ about restless spirits and floatin’ princesses’” so she dug up the princess’ bones. She hands Mr. Barnhart a box wrapped in a blanket. “’This is all I could find of her, and it’s not much more than eye-teeth and gristle’” (pp. 71-72).

Mr. Barnhart reluctantly agrees to support Mrs. Dowdel’s plan. “’I’m not a showman,’” he tells his wife. “’It sounds like they won’t want a funeral. They’ll want a show.’” He shakes the blanket-wrapped box and adds, “’I don’t think there’s much of anything in this box…. Or anybody” (pp. 73-74).

Nina Lindsey at SLJ writes

“It’s mostly the digging-up-and-reburying of the ‘bones’ that really upsets me…. What Grandma Dowdel is doing is capitalizing on the publicity that a ‘Kickapoo Princess Ghost’ generates to insure the success of a Christian Church.”

Her blogging counterpart, Jonathan Hunt, contends that Peck’s writing is satirical.

“He is not making a comment on Native culture, but rather the white culture that finds it, by turns, fascinating, mystifying, and exotic.”

Were Mrs. Dowdel’s actions exploitative, as one Heavy Medal commenter said? Do her actions offend? Does the book perpetuate stereotypes? I encourage StorySleuths readers to look at the SLJ Heavy Medal posts and reader comments, as well as subsequent posts. The debate is fascinating on multiple levels.

Why do I bring this up? I must admit that when I first read this section in A Season of Gifts, I assumed the bones were as fake as the princess ghost. Mrs. Dowdel devised the funeral for two purposes, namely stopping people from visiting her property and helping the struggling church. Mr. Barnhart’s sermon (“Her communion the juice of the berry/And the loaf from this Illinois grain”), made me a little uncomfortable because of the mixture of references to nature and Christian symbols. I did not see any potential for offense. I merely saw Mrs. Dowdel’s hoax.

It is clear, though, that these sections do offend. Debbie Reese commented, “Disgusting lack of respect. Utter lack of shame.” (Read more at her blog, American Indians in Children’s Literature).

Second, as a writer, I would hate to cause offense to readers through negligence or ignorance. I am a white, middle-class female writer who grew up in the United States. And yet, I cannot write about my neighborhood only. I live in a diverse, multi-cultural world. I write about characters who travel to places as near as California and as far as India. How do I portray their experiences authentically and sensitively?

If Richard Peck, a Newbery Medal-winning author, can get in trouble, then what about the rest of us? What can we as writers do? Should we only write about our own culture? How do we reflect the diversity of the world or, in the case of historical fiction, the realities of the past?

Debra McArthur, who is graduating this semester from Hamline University’s MFA in Writing for Children program, wrote her critical thesis about this subject. In a lecture this summer, she said,

We all have the responsibility to work our hardest to create non-rascist literature: to portray the characters who need to be in our stories in ways that represent them as people, not stereotypes.

Debra had a number of suggestions, including:

• Be aware of predictable stumbling blocks (see guidelines from the Council on Interracial Books for Children)
• Recognize our own limited view of the world
• Be honest in our appraisal of our own work
• Be willing to accept criticism and consider other viewpoints
• Know that we will likely fail in some respects.

Returning to A Season of Gifts, I don’t know Peck’s intentions for this section. Maybe he meant it to be satirical. Maybe he meant it to be funny. One of Heavy Medal’s readers made an interesting comment about the princess bones. “They aren’t organic or necessary part of the story, and I don’t think they add anything important or valuable… either.”

This comment made me wonder: If Peck didn’t mean to write satirically, could he have found a different way for Mrs. Dowdel to help the Barnharts’ church?

Allyson, I am learning so much about craft from reading and rereading A Season of Gifts. Peck is a skilled writer who brings places and people to life. This issue with the Kickapoo Princess reminds me that we must bring as much attention to our story choices as we do to our craft. We need to be aware of what we are doing when we write outside our own culture or time period. We risk falling short of our intentions, as Debra McArthur noted, but we must do our best to tell our stories honestly and fairly.

StorySleuths Tip #35: Solicit feedback from others. If something seems potentially offensive or insensitive, ask whether the questionable part is integral to the story. Review the CIBC guidelines. Brainstorm other options for achieving story goals.

CHARACTER: A Season of Gifts

Hi Heather,

You tied setting up so neatly – thank you! In your post you mention Peck’s masterful way of creating settings using vivid descriptions. This made me think about the way he uses description to paint pictures of characters as well:

About Mrs. Wilcox: “Her eyes were all over the place, and her teeth came out to meet you.” (p. 47)

About Ruth Ann: “She was all eyes and mouth. Even her braids looked interested.” (p. 46)

About Roscoe: “He worked his chin from sideburn to sideburn with one of his big thorny hands and gave her a deep blue-and-green stare. It was like he’d never seen a girl before.” (p. 35)

When exploring character I came upon the web site of Rick Riordan, author of the enormously successful #1 New York Times bestselling Percy Jackson and the Olympians series for children, and the multi-award-winning Tres Navarre mystery series for adults. About describing characters Riordan says,

“Describe characters as Dickens did – with a single deft stroke. A laundry list of physical traits is realistic, but it is neither memorable nor compelling.”

When reading the writing of young kids, I find they are compelled to describe the character’s size, his eye color and the color of his hair. Always. And you know what? We grown-up writers do it, too. What we need to remember is that unless the description creates the character as a unique and memorable one—don’t bother. As you read or re-read A Season of Gifts, notice how Peck uses a few, very precise words to paint characters in a vivid, unforgettable way.

We have seen that both setting and character benefit from unique description, so is description the most important way to draw your character for your reader?

Back to Rick Riordan, who says this:

“Define a character through action, first. Through dialogue and description, second. Through explanation, never. The character should be primarily defined by the choices he makes, and the actions he takes. How does he respond to violence? How does he respond to love? Secondly, a character must be vividly but deftly describe through his speech, and through the initial view you give the. Never stop to explain who a character is when we can watch him in action and decide for ourselves.”

I will focus here on the character Mrs. Dowdel, and take a look at how action, description and dialogue create a complete picture of who she is. As for description, we first meet Mrs. Dowdel when we see her through Bob’s eyes:

“Every blazing morning she’d tramp off her back porch and down her garden rows with a hoe humped on her shoulder. Her straw hat looked like she’d swiped it off a mule. It hid her face except for her chins. She worked right through high noon in a fog of flies hoeing, yanking weeds, and talking to her tomato plants.

The heat slowed her some, and the flies. But she could be amazingly light on her big pins. We’d already seen her take a broom and swat the Fuller Brush man off her porch. She kept right at his heels till he was off her property.

As everybody knew, she didn’t neighbor and went to no known church.” (p. 6-7)

What have we learned? That Mrs. Dowdel is a larger-than-life kind of character, both physically and otherwise. She is independent. She is deliberate in her actions, and she cherishes her privacy to the point of having little to do with neighbors or church. We also know that Bob is new to town, and that the information about Mrs. Dowdel as a woman who keeps her distance from both neighbors and church comes from an outside source—“As everybody knew.”

 Now let’s take a look at how Peck sharpens our focus on Mrs. Dowdel through dialogue and action. When she discovers Bob in her privy Mrs. Dowdel takes him in and furnishes him with an outfit. Her actions contradict what Bob has come to know about her. Her actions speak of a woman who is, in fact, quite neighborly. Sending Bob home in the hand-me-down clothes of her grandson Mrs. Dowdel says, “I’ve got me a spare jar of apple butter. . .And I baked today. You can take the loaf to your Maw. Tell her you found it on the porch.” (p. 30)

Mrs. Dowdel doesn’t just give Bob any old clothes to go home in, she gives him treasured belongings of a young man who clearly meant a great deal to her. She doesn’t send him home with one of the half-dozen loaves of bread she baked today—she tells him to take “the loaf”—probably her only one. And she doesn't want any recognition for her kindness--she is selfless on top of everything else.

The old adage “actions speak louder than words” is a key one to remember when creating memorable characters. Throughout A Season of Gifts Mrs. Dowdel’s actions and her dialogue speak louder than any narrative description could. Her kindness toward Ruth Ann and Mrs. Wilcox. Her effort to see that justice is served to Roscoe Burdick. The funeral, and then the wedding that put Bob’s father’s church on the map. These all betray a big-hearted woman who watches out for her neighbors with a rough-edged tenderness.

StorySleuth’s tip #34: I cannot say it any better than Rick Riordan does: “Define a character through action, first. Through dialogue and description, second. Through explanation, never.”

SETTING & LANDSCAPE: A Season of Gifts

Hi Allyson,
Thanks so much for inviting me to explore A Season of Gifts with you. I love digging into great writing to figure out what makes it tick. Richard Peck gives us lots to think about in his most recent novel, which is set in the same rural Illinois town as two of his most well-known books, A Year Down Yonder (Newbery Medal) and A Long Way from Chicago (Newbery Honor).

Setting plays a critical role in this new book, which relates the experiences of the Barnhart family, who recently moved to town to start a new Methodist church. In fact, the book begins with an image of the house next door to their new home:

“You could see from here the house was haunted. Its crooked old lightning rods pointed bony fingers at the sky. It hadn’t had a lick of paint since VJ Day, maybe the war before that. A porch sagged off one side.” (p. 5)

Writing books often caution writers not to start a novel with setting details. However, those three lines convey a wealth of information that extends beyond the obvious (the house is old). The reference to VJ Day hints at the time period, post-World War II. And words like haunted, crooked, and bony evoke mood and hint at what’s to come.

This spooky, old place belongs to Mrs. Dowdel, and many of the individual settings in the novel take place in her garden or house, which Peck describes in wonderful detail. Here, Bob enters an upstairs bedroom:

“In there, dusty west light filtered through darned curtains. The windowsill was a wasp graveyard. An ancient brass bed angled out of a corner… A darker triangle showed on the wallpaper where a pennant had hung.” (p. 27)

The implication of these details is clear: Mrs. Dowdel hasn’t used this room for a long time. The imagery, though, is fresh. Peck doesn’t rely on a stock layer of dust or a musty smell. He shows us the dead wasps by the window and the space where a pennant once hung. And while the images are unusual, they are also the kind of details that a twelve-year-old boy, our narrator, might notice.

I could continue with more examples of how Peck creates unique individual settings for each scene, but I want to shift to the broader setting of the novel, a small town in the late 1950s. As a work of historical fiction, the time period is a critical element of setting. Interestingly, Peck doesn’t reveal the exact year, 1958, until page 20.

Using the same technique that you discussed in your posting, Allyson, Peck alludes to the time frame in previous pages through details such as the comment about “VJ Day” as well as through specific references to things like Ruth Ann’s hula hoop and doll buggy, the Fuller Brush man, and Rinso soap. Bob’s father feels thankful for their home’s indoor plumbing: many of the houses in town still have “privies.” And Bob notes that everyone else in town has a television antenna. When the year finally appears, it is another one of those A-ha! moments you noted.

Peck continues to refer to the time period throughout the book. Details such as clothing, names, music, and current events remind readers that the story takes place in 1958. Here are just a few examples.

• Bob’s older sister loves Elvis. When Elvis gets shipped off to Germany, she refuses to go to school.
• Walking past the Dairy Queen, where all of the town’s teenagers hang out, Bob notes that “The guys were all buzz cuts and ducktails.” (p. 35)
• The girls’ names are all Fifties-sounding, including Phyllis, Ruth Ann, Barbara Jean, Edna-Earl and Vanette.

These examples, along with many other details about life in the 1950s, appear throughout the novel. They keep the reader grounded in time.

Likewise, Peck keeps the reader grounded in place by layering in details of rural small town life: the train that flashes by each evening, the Homecoming Parade, gossip and rumors that spread like wildfire, church gatherings, tractor pulls, hay rides, and meetings of the Future Farmers of America.

The overall effect of Peck’s individual settings as well as the depth of place and time details reminds me of mystery writer Elizabeth George’s distinction between setting and landscape. In Write Away: One Novelist’s Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life, George says

“… setting is where a story takes place—including where each scene takes place—while landscape is much broader than that…. It’s the broad vista into which the writer actually places the individual settings of the novel.”

In another passage, she explains, “Landscape is the total place experience in a novel.” (pp. 29-30)

In reading A Season of Gifts, I get a total place—and time—experience. By evoking mood, focusing on concrete setting details and weaving the narrative throughout the novel with references to place and time period, Peck paints a broad landscape of life in a small, southern Illinois town in the late 1950s.

StorySleuths Tip #33: Think beyond setting alone. Paint a broad landscape for readers by including unique individual settings, concrete details, fresh imagery, and references to the time period and place.

ALLUSION: A Season of Gifts

Dear Heather,

First, thank you SO much for joining us in an online discussion of Richard Peck’s novel, A Season of Gifts. I know that you’ve been enjoying the critical analysis side of your work in the Hamline MFA program, and am glad that you’re able to bring that to a book discussion here at StorySleuths.

Years ago, at an SCBWI conference, Sid Fleischman said that if you want a reader to see something, point to it. This makes a great deal of sense. As writers, we sometimes dance around what we are really trying to say in the interest of being clever or mysterious. Instead of illuminating things for our readers, we leave them in the dark.

What I have loved in A Season of Gifts is the way that Richard Peck does NOT point to things—at least not directly. Instead, he alludes to them.

Before I share an example that really worked for me, let me POINT to why I think this can be such a powerful way of writing, especially for younger readers. In alluding to something rather than pointing to it we engage our readers at a deeper level. We drop clues for them like word-shaped breadcrumbs. The reader follows our trail, and then there is an A-ha! moment when he grasps the point we have been alluding to—he has become a participant in the unfolding of the story. This is a marvelous gift to give a reader, especially a younger reader who winds up not only loving the story, but feeling empowered because he “gets it.”

I’m going to jump all the way to the end of the book and talk about the wedding scene. If you have not finished the book, I’m about to spill some beans . . .

Recall the scene when the homecoming parade is winding its way through town. About the self-appointed homecoming queen, Waynetta, Mrs. Dowdel says, “She looks a little peaked and off her feed. . .And I’ve seen better hair on bacon.” (p. 90)

On my first pass through the book I read this line and thought nothing of it, aside from laughing out loud at the hair comment. Then I reached the scene at the Christmas wedding. In comes Waynetta wearing the same outfit she’d worn on the homecoming float, only it didn’t look as good this time around. “It didn’t fit her as well now. Her dress-up suit strained around the middle.” (p. 155)

Hmmm, she looked peaked, and now the dress is straining around the middle. I wondered, is Peck trying to tell me something here? Soon I learned that Roscoe, the groom, was clearly not at the wedding by choice, “there was panic in his blue-and-green stare. Blind panic.” (p. 157) I learned that the bride’s mother had opted to stay home, feeling a bit ill. Finally, the narrator shared that long after the day of the wedding, he overheard his mother tell his father that instead of “Joy to the World,” perhaps a more appropriate wedding song would have been “For Unto Us a Child is Born.” (p. 157)

I read this book aloud to my boys the first time through, and there was a glimmer of a blush on my thirteen-year-old’s face when he suddenly sat up and announced, “I think Waynetta is pregnant.” He then went on to rattle off all the clues, proud of how he had put it all together.

Again and again in this story Peck packs in subtle clues to allude to the nature of characters or their relationships:

A-ha! So it was Mrs. Dowdel dropping off all those gifts on the porch!
A-ha! So it was Ruth Anne who dressed up as the Kickapoo Princess!

It occurs to me that what I am describing is really an expansion of the concept of showing rather than telling, but the piece of craft that struck me was the way Peck unfolded the showing so slowly, so expertly over the course of many chapters. When full realization hit me, I felt as if I had earned it.

StorySleuths Tip # 32: To deepen a readers experience with a story give them opportunities to figure things out themselves by alluding to things rather than pointing directly at them.