Francisco's Journal

Integrity

Francisco Stork — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 15:55:36 +0000

I’ve been thinking about what it means for a young adult novel to have integrity. I approach the subject from the point of view of the author. How can I write a novel for young people with integrity and why is it important that I do so? I don’t know why it is so hard to write about integrity. It is almost as if integrity and silence go together. The minute you start speaking about integrity you are in danger of losing it. But maybe the risk is worth taking.

The reason why it is so difficult to write about integrity is because integrity has a lot to do with intent and motive. Why am I writing this? The young adult novel will have integrity if it is written in response to an inner calling, a spiritual necessity. When the impulse to create is pure, when what it seeks is the expression of beauty and goodness, the result is a work that has integrity.

So integrity is something that happens in the mind and heart of the author. But the motive of the author cannot help but manifest itself in the work. There it waits to be recognized by the reader. Integrity is an invisible presence recognized by an invisible awareness. Integrity gives rise to trust between writer and reader. “Yes, I give you my heart. I now know you have my wellbeing in mind,” says the reader wordlessly when integrity is apprehended.

To write with integrity is difficult. To do so the writer must invoke a sort of amnesia for all those external considerations that detract from the work itself. How hard these days to forget about sales and awards and praise or its opposite. But I don’t think integrity means that the writer must forget about the reader – the person for whom she is writing. Rather, to write with integrity means to respect the intelligence, the feelings, the autonomy of the reader. It means that I as an author will remain true to an artistic vision that I intend to share. That the artistic vision is to be shared imposes certain limits to the creation. And it is here in the imposition of limits that I as an author will respect my reader. It is here that I will keep her wellbeing in mind. This dance, this tension, between responsibility to the work and responsibility to the reader is where integrity may be found, where it lives like a spark of life.

Inspiration

Francisco Stork — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 13:13:19 +0000

Do not worry that your love’s beauty

Will dazzle me,

Blind me,

Keep me

From my daily bread.

Do not worry that the bursting

Notes of your anvil

Will stun me to dead stillness.

Do not be anxious.

Let your giving fall

As the rain.

I will take

The bucking wildness

Into a pasture so deep

That no one will hear

The hoofs beating the earth.

I will swaddle

The screaming miracle

Succor it with silence.

Do not be anxious

Of giving’s peril.

Let your love fall

As the rain.

The Writer’s Faith

Francisco Stork — Sat, 29 May 2010 21:58:55 +0000

Writing a book can teach you about life, how to live your days, if you let it. Take this thing we call faith, this mystery that is as real in its presence as it is in its absence. You need it. The book cannot get written without it. But what is it? The kind of faith you need, the one you’re looking for, the kind you wait for open-eyed and thirsty is more than a belief. I believe in myself. I believe I can do it. My experience is that this kind of mental faith (for belief is a thing of the head) doesn’t get you too far. The faith that works is the kind that triggers surrender and that follows it. This vision of a book that I have, there’s no way that I can make it real. The work is beyond my powers and yet it must be done. I put my foot in the water, testing, and I wade in slowly. Or I dive in careless of depths or petrels. Faith is this two-chambered heart of giving up and going on. And as the book gets written sentence by sentence yet another kind of faith is needed. Let’s call it faith in the reality of your creation. The world that you are creating is made real and kept alive by your faith. You must not doubt your creation’s power or its purpose or its goodness. The world you have created has been made real by your faith and now you begin to love. You love your characters, the things that happen to them, the world they live in. Faith has become love. And that’s what it always wanted to be.

This Work of Mine

Francisco Stork — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 15:18:17 +0000

This so called labor of love.
How like the pear tree
In my backyard
With its imperfect fruit.
How can I bear like you?
So natural and unstruggled.
So at ease with your gift.

The Song

Francisco Stork — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 23:30:07 +0000

It is not logical to hear such a melody
this late spring
when the rains are still cold.
I had to stop when it first came,
its beckoning unrecognizable
or too familiar.

How can the frozen earth not
crack
to such song?
How can the numb cardinal not
sing
to the first sun?

It was almost too late
the sound of the first rain drop.
I stopped only because it hurt.
That dark echo.
That flash of sound.

-Francisco X. Stork
March 29, 2010

Holland

Francisco Stork — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 22:03:22 +0000

This past week, I was invited to visit Holland by Lemniscaat, the Dutch publisher of Marcelo in the Real World. It was a particularly meaningful trip because my step father, Charlie Stork, was Dutch. There were many things about the trip that were touching and had an impact on me, but the one that sticks out the most in my mind was looking into the eyes of many Dutch people and seeing in there the same kind, bright, spark of life that I used to see in my father’s eyes. I met Charlie Stork when I was six years old and I lost him to an automobile accident when I was thirteen. It was too short a time but it was enough for me to be grateful, to recognize the influence that a father has on a son. Going to Holland at age 57 meant so much to me. I will never forget the in-depth interviews by reporters who had read Marcelo two or three times, the attentive faces of the children at the schools, the kind people at the bookstores who listened to my sales pitch. Thank you Lemniscaat for bringing me to the home of my father and letting me find my adoptive roots.

The Last Summer of the Death Warriors

Francisco Stork — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:51:42 +0000

The Last Summer of the Death Warriors, my fourth novel, officially comes out today. I started to write Death Warriors only a few months after submitting the final draft for Marcelo in the Real World. Like the other books that I have written, the seed for this one had been inside of me for many years. The seed was simply this: two very different young men (one very philosophical and idealistic and the other one very emotional and phyisical) get involved in an adventure and are transformed by each other in the process. We are used to thinking of “adventure” as something that involves physical risk, but I wanted my adventure to be about spiritual risk, about the meaning of life and the risk of not finding it. I have to confess that it was a difficult book to write. Marcelo in the Real World was so well received that I wondered whether I would ever write another book like that. It took a couple of months of struggle to finally accept that this was a different book, with its own truths to tell and its own voice. Death Warriors is a deeply personal book. Personal not in the sense that it is autobiographical, but in the sense that I lived and suffered with Pancho and D.Q. as I wrote about them. I wish this book well on this day. May it touch readers as deeply as it touched me.

The Schneider Family Book Award

Francisco Stork — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 20:08:42 +0000

Marcelo in the Real World was the recipient of this year’s Schneider Family Book Award. I am so very proud and honored to have received this award. It is a very meaningful award to me. The award is given for “a book that embodies an artistic expression of the disability experience for child and adolescent audiences.” The award, for me, recognizes the many young men and women who suffer because their perception of the world differs from that of a neuro-typical person. The award is also a recognition that “artistic expression” can take us into the world of the non-neuro-typical person like nothing else. People sometimes ask me how I came upon Marcelo’s voice, a voice that resembles the voice of so many young people with Asperger’s syndrome, and ultimately I have no answer other than to say that the voice was a gift and also that somewhere in me I too must have Marcelo’s voice, I too must see the world the way he sees it, if only in a small way. I am glad there are awards like the Schneider Award.

End of the Year Lists

Francisco Stork — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 15:58:43 +0000

For the first time in my writing career, a book of mine has appeared on various Best Book of the Year lists. I’ve been wondering for a couple of weeks now as to how to respond (at least to myself). I have referenced the various lists and commendations elsewhere on this website, but I felt that this praise for the book, proud and honored as I am of receiving it, needed to be put into perspective (at least to myself). I think of the many good books that didn’t get listed and which deserve to be read. I remember a couple of books of mine that have gone by unnoticed - heartfelt books as worthy to be read, in my view, as Marcelo. So I wanted to say something (at least to myself) about lists and awards and competitions but all I could think of were the words of T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets (East Coker).

And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to
conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot
hope
To emulate -but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under
conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

True Love

Francisco Stork — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 15:39:21 +0000

I thought I would get philosophical (for a change!) and ask what it means to love a book. I often hear the phrase: “I liked it but I didn’t love it”, applied to a book. It surprises me to hear the word love so selectively applied to a book when it is so easily bandied about otherwise: “I love these potato chips.” It seems that we have more reverence for the word “love” when we refer to a book. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s just my own inner desire to save the preciousness of the word by using it only when I believe it to be true love. It seems to me that love for a book entails both the rapture of first love and the commitment of forever love. If that is the case, no wonder I find it hard to love just any book. By “rapture of first love” I mean that recognition of the book’s beauty, its goodness, its literary qualities all of which are experienced in a kind of rapture, a losing of myself in the world of the book. (Sounds very much like falling in love for a person, doesn’t it?). By “Commitment of forever love” I mean that I choose, that I select and prefer this book to the many other books I have read. It means that the book is now a part of me and I a part of it. It means that I don’t want to leave it, that even as I finish reading it, I already want to return it. It means that along with the passion of the initial rapture there is also a peace that is intuitively recognized as lasting. This is true love for me. I only want to add that true love is subjective. There are “classics” that I don’t love and there are what many would consider poorly written books that I love with all my heart. With these last kind there is a recognition of souls that takes places that pierces through the surface. May our hearts be always full of love.