The Konigsburg Collective.

E.L. Konigsburg passed away last month. Maybe you already knew that. Maybe you've no idea what I'm talking about. I hope the name sparks something in you. I hope you'll keep reading anyway.

E.L. Konigsburg wrote children's books, two of which have won the Newbery Medal and another the Newbery Honor (she lost to herself that year), and three that are among my top ten favorites of all time, the first books I recommend when any parent or child is asking. In short, she's good. She's the author I want to be — and the one I pretend to be, when by myself on long car rides where sometimes (I don't know, it just happens, you can judge me, really I know) I talk out loud, pretending to be an expert on the writing process so that I can better understand it myself.  But I didn't even know she was gone until I came home to an email from a blog reader. She wrote,

I follow your blog and remembered that you once mentioned your admiration of the author E.L. Konigsburg, whom I also love. I am an aspiring writer of children's stories, a young mother, and I've claimed E.L. Konigsburg as more than a muse through my process, so much so that I was about to write her a letter, like today. And to my surprise, I found out she passed away about a week ago. But I'm related to no one, nor friends with anyone who would understand the great loss I feel at her death. So, you popped into my head and I didn't know if you knew or if you will think this is weird but sometimes you just need someone who gets it, you know? I feel there should be headlines and national readings of her work but, alas, an extraordinary storyteller has died, and I feel it is the saddest secret.

I read Mallory's email as the sun set against the remnants of a day-long storm. Outside the sky was still thick with bruisy black clouds and the light  only managed to cut under them horizontally in great dense discs of orange-gold, making for that lovely strength of light that throws everything into severe relief softened by the late hour. None of which is relevant except to say that I read Mallory's email and then stared out the window for a very long time afterwards. 

E.L. Konigsburg passed away last month, and I hadn't heard a thing. I started researching, wanting to know more, demanding the world provide it. I didn't find much — The New York Times ran an obituary, Publisher's Weekly paid their dues, there are a handful of blog posts marking the date and the Tumblr tag is full of loyal reblogs in her name — and what I did find wasn't the substance I wanted, or maybe just not the substance I thought necessary to reflect an author as substantial as E.L. Konigsburg. Because that's what it always was, wasn't it? Real, solid, straight stuff. Even in the most outrageous situations. What I love about her writing is its unflinching directness while maintaining an essential innocence, that so many of her plot lines involve hard things, tricky things, real things that in this world you need to understand—but she does not bludgeon you bloody with them the way so many other books do, hitting you upside the head and right in the stomach in their determination to prove to you that they are a Very Important Book Dealing with Very Important Things. No. With Konigsburg you follow them quietly, carefully, in a spirit of observation and deduction so that in the end you have begun to interpret them in your own right; not feeling victimized, but free. She is the paragon of what I in my mind have always deemed "intelligent fiction," stories that triumph passion for the world around you down to the deepest details, with a reverence for what we have been given and what more we have to give in engaging with it and making it our own. Stories that reiterate the joy of living, that, like Monica Hesse wrote in a nearly perfect paragraph for the Washington Post, "knowledge is worth possessing, even when it's not publicized, even when it's not Tweeted. It carries its own inherent worth." 

For me, Konigsburg has always been a refuge. I could recount for you any number of afternoons I have fled to the library and straightaway to the Juvenile stacks, K shelf, and I'm not just remembering my elementary school years.  My very last semester of University I returned nearly desperately to The View from Saturday because I knew it would never disappoint me even when I so often found some "higher" texts of the newer literature always did. And that idea, this idea that I could read about Mrs. Olinski and The Souls on their way to Academic Bowl stardom as a sixth grader feeling like I'd discovered the secrets to all words and here, thirteen years later, not only find its magic steady but thirteen times stronger?

Mallory was right. There should be headlines and national readings. There should be library memorials and book club revivals. But there aren't. So between the two of us we endeavored to come up with an offering of our own, which is why starting now until however long it takes us we will be remembering one new Konigsburg book per month, trading small essays in tribute to her bibliography under the banner of The Konigsburg Collective. A book club of sorts, I suppose you could say, though there's no pressure to follow along exactly or even at all. Maybe it's just an excuse for us to read them all over again. Maybe it's an excuse for you to read them for the first time. At any rate . . . one book, once a month . . . can't hurt. And I promise we'll all be the better for it.

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Want to get a head start? The Konigsburg Collective sets off where so many of us first began—Mallory will be back this month with The Mixed of Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. 

remembrance day.

Last week, Veteran's Day, another eleven I love. And I like how it is done here, how weeks of reminding lead up to the big remembrance. At street corners and subway stops, next to the till, outside the bookshop, the grocers, the opera. Paper poppies in boxes, ten pence or ten pounds, paper poppies in boxes. Mine from the window overlooking the gardens at Kensington. I carry it home in cupped hands because I don't want to bend the petals. I wrap the stem in tape colored like the sky so that it stays close against the safety pin, so it lays flat above my heart. I pin it to my coat collar. I pin it to my shirt. I pin it to my sweater. Every day all week long I wear the poppy. Everyone is wearing poppies. Business men who get off at Bond Street wearing black,  punky teenagers taking up too many seats at the back of the train, a wrinkled woman folding into a taxi cab, tiny children in mittens. Between trains we walk so quickly, going so many places. All of us and our poppies. Row on row. 

We are the dead. In my head I hear words I learned a dozen years ago. I remember them all. I walk along the river after dark. I walk for miles.

a letter from London, long overdue.

I am in a plane and I am a prayer. That was my first sentence. Every sinew of self stretched to silent supplication. The beginning of the essay about the time I moved to London, that one time I packed a suitcase, a carry-on, and two ziplocs of trail mix and moved not just across the country but out of it. I was going to be scared and second-guessing, I was going to make evident my insanity but perhaps eventually arrive at some small understanding, conclude with a quiet sentence in favor of strength. It might have been really something.  

Instead, I am in a plane and I am a prayer of irrepressible hallelujah. This is my first sentence. To be fair, round one of the flight was mostly foreboding—from Salt Lake City to Chicago I watched clouds collect like an inverted tundra beneath our wings, mottled, thick, and frozen. At one point I felt compelled to recite The Wasteland, Unreal City,/under the brown fog of a winter dawn. But even I had to admit that was too dramatic. And the woman next to me seemed concerned. Talking to oneself. Generally worrisome. 

But I am in a plane and I am every cell singing impetuous praise, and I can't tell you exactly why or where it is coming from except to explain that sometimes answers arrive only after you have accepted the question, and as my triple seven lifts up over the Windy City it seems to me that this is Heaven's version of a hearty high-five. The sun setting behind us has painted clouds the color of the Renaissance, and the Sistine sky rolls from gilded rose into deep purpled blue. One particularly painterly thunderhead flat-bottoms like a mushroom cloud and it is not sinister but somehow holy and I find myself wanting Wordsworth to write this, remembering that he already has. Trailing clouds of glory. Intimations of immortality. I watch the sun set until I can see only stars. 

There are still things to worry about. I do not know where I am living, I haven't fully finished enrollment at the university, I don't know when I will next talk to John or what exactly to declare as my intended purpose for entry on the customs card the stewardess hands to me with the tonic water I requested. I can't sleep on planes. I can't sleep unless I am lying down and it is dark and it is completely quiet, and on planes I am 0 for 3. I have a lot of time to think about what I've done. There is another hour of asphyxiating anxiety in the early morning, when I choose to focus on the shadows between the stars rather than count out the constellations. But I force myself to close my eyes and fall into fitful half-dreams and when I wake up it is proper morning and below me the sun has tipped over the edge of the world and the river lights up like liquid gold, spinning into the heart of a city that has my whole life spoken to me like home. Have you ever seen A Room with a View? Joy! Beauty! Love! From above, every building, each street, every turn of the Thames declaring the eternal yes.

__________________________________

All of this was six weeks ago. I found a flat. I'm more than a month into my masters program and in the thick of theses and thinking. I talk to John more than most people would assume necessary but is somehow not ever enough for me. And while I still can't tell you that I know exactly my ultimate purpose in being here (on the card I settled with "study;" this might prove the most pertinent way to define my daily walk, though I meant it more innocently then), I can say that this morning I woke up happy, that there are few things more whole and holy than knowing you are in the right place at the right time.