Bridge to Terabithia — Newbery Acceptance Speech, By Katherine Paterson

The day after my early-morning call telling me that Bridge to Terabithia had won the Newbery Medal, a scene from my childhood kept replaying itself in my head. A chubby-faced eight-year-old is telling her older brother and sister what she desperately hopes is a very funny story.
            “Katherine,” they ask sweetly when she finishes, “did you make that up all by yourself?”
            “Yes,” She nods eagerly.
            “Sounded like it.”
            You cannot see my eight-year-old self, but I promise you, she is here tonight as I accept your honor for this funny little wounded story which I made up myself and which sounds like it. It is a marvelous thing to know that it has been heard and not despised. Thank you.
            When I say I made it up all by myself, that is not really true. I know how very many people are a part of its making: Lisa Hill, from whose life and death the story sprang; my husband John who loved it first; our children, Lin, John, David and Mary; the Womeldorf family in which I, like Jesse Aarons, was the middle child of five; the sixth grade class I taught, or who taught me, in rural Virginia more than twenty years ago; Virginia Buckley, my editor and my friend, along with all my fellow workers at Thomas Y. Crowell; Donna Diamond with her delicate but, at the same time, powerful illustrations. My new friends at Crowell and Harper understand that I need to say a special thanks to Ann Beneduce and Sophie Silberberg whose love and concern not only for my work but for me has meant so much to my life.
            I was told that I could make a long speech, but if I mention everyone who has helped me, we’ll be in Chicago until the next blizzard. So, my loving and beloved ones, I am very grateful.
            The summer our son David was three years old he fell in love with bridges. I understood just how he felt, being a love bridges myself, and coming home from Lake George the whole family took delight in the bridges along the way. We were spending the night with our Long Island cousins; it was well after dark, and everyone was getting cranky by the time the last bridge was crossed.
            “When is the next bridge, Mommy?” David asked.
            “There aren’t any more,” I told him. “We’re almost at Uncle Arthur’s house now.”
            “Just one more bridge, Mommy, please, just one more bridge,” he said, believing in his three-year-old heart that mothers can do anything, including instant bridge building.
            “There aren’t any more bridges, sweetheart, we’re almost there.”
            He began to weep. “Please, Mommy, just one more bridge.”
            Nothing we said could console him. I was at my wit’s end. Why couldn’t he understand that I was no maliciously withholding his heart’s desire – that there was no way I could conjure up a bridge and throw it in the path of our car? When would he know that I was a human being, devoid of any magic power?

It was later that night that I remembered. The next day I could give him a bridge, and not just any bridge. The next day I could give him the Verrazano Bridge. I could hardly wait.

That is the last and only time I was given credit for building the Verrazano Bridge, but it occurs to me that I have spent a good part of my life trying to construct bridges. Usually my bridges have turned out looking much more like the bridge to Terabithia, a few planks over a newly dry gully, than that elegant span across the Narrows. There were so many chasms I saw that needed bridging – chasms of time and culture and disparate human nature – that I began sawing and hammering at the rough wood planks for my children and for any other children who might read what I had written. But of course I could not make a bridge for them any more than I could conjure one up that night on Long Island. I discovered gradually and not without a little pain that you don’t put together abridge for a child, you become one. You lay yourself across the chasm. It is there in the Simon and Garfunkel song
“Like a bridge over troubled waters I will lay me down….”  
The waters to be crossed are not always troubled. The land on the other side of the river may be flowing with joy, not to mention milk and honey. But still the bridge that the child trusts or delights in-and in my case, the book that will take children from where they are to where they might be-needs to be made not from synthetic or inanimate objects, but from the stuff of life. And a writher has no life to give but her own.
My first three novels were set in feudal Japan, but I never considered them remote from my life. I had left Japan seven years before I wrote the first of them, but in writing them, I had a chance to become almost Japanese again, and if you know me, you know that Muna and Takiko and Jiro are me as well. Yet of all the people I have ever written about, perhaps Jess Aarons is more neatly me than any other, and in writing this book, I have thrown my body across the chasm that had most terrified me.

I have been afraid of death since I was a child-lying stiffly in the dark, my arms glued to my sides, afraid that sleep would seduce me into a land of no awakening or of wakening into judgment.

As I grew up, the fear went underground, but never really went away. Then I was forty-one years old with a husband and four children whom I loved very much. My first novel published and a second soon to be, with a third bubbling along, friends I cared about in a town I delighted to live in, when it was discovered that I had cancer. I could not in any justice cry “Why me?” for no one had been given more of the true wealth of this world than I. Surely as card-carrying member of the human race some dues must be paid. But even though the operation was pronounced successful and the prognosis hopeful, it was a hard season for me and my family, and just when it seemed that we were all on our feet again and beginning to get on with life, our David’s closest friend was struck and killed by lightning.  If the spring and summer had been hard, they were noting compared to the fall. David went through all the classical stages of grief, inventing a few the experts have yet to catalog. In one of these he decided that since Lisa had been good, God had not killed her for her sin, but as a punishment for him, David. Moreover, God would continue to punish him by killing off everyone he loved. I was second on the list, right after sister Mary.  We listened to him and cried with him, but we could not give Lisa back to him, these mere mortals that he now knew his parents to be. In January, I went to a meeting of the Children’s Book Guild of Washington at which Ann Durell of Dutton was to speak. By some chance or design, depending on your theology, I was put at head table. In the polite amenities before lunch someone said to me, “How are the children?” for which the answer, as we all know, is, “Fine.” But I botched it. Before I could stop myself to really tell how the children were, leading my startled tablemates deep into the story of David’s grief. No one interrupted me. But when I finally shut up, Ann Durell said very gently.” I know this sounds just like an editor, but you should write that story. Of course,” she added, she added, “the child can’t die by lightning. No editor would ever believe that.” I thought I couldn’t write it, that I was too close and too overwhelmed, but I began to try to write. It would be a kind of therapy for me, if not for the children. I started to write in pencil on the free pages of a used spiral notebook so that when it came to nothing I could pretend that I’d never been very serious about it. After a few false starts, thirty-two smudged pages emerged which made me feel that perhaps there might be a book after all. In a flush of optimism I moved to the typewriter and pounded out a few dozen more, only to find myself growing colder and colder with every page until I was totally frozen. The time had come for my fictional child to die, and I could not let it happen. I caught up on my correspondence, I rearranged my bookshelves, I rearranged my bookshelves, I even cleaned the kitchen-anything to keep the inevitable from happening. And then one day a friend asked, as a friend will, “How is the new book coming?” and I blurted out-“I’m writing a book in which a child dies and I can’t let her die. I guess,” I said, “I can’t face going through Lisa’s death again.”

“Katherine,” she said, looking me in the eye, for she is a true friend, “ I don’t think it’s Lisa’s death you can’t face. I think it’s yours.” I went straight home to my study and closed the door. If it was my death I could not face, then by God, I would face it. I began in a kind of fever and in a day I had written the chapter and within a few weeks, I had complete the draft, the cold sweat pouring down my arms. It was not a finished book and I knew it, but I went ahead and did what no real writer ever do; I had it typed up and mailed it off to Virginia before the sweat had a chance to evaporate.  There is no span of time quite so eternal as that between the mailing of manuscript of an editor’s reply. I knew she hated it; that’s why she hadn’t written or called. It was weird and raw and no good, and she was trying to think of some kind of some kind way to tell me that I was through as a writer. Finally she called. “I laughed through the first two thirds and cried through the last,” she said. So it was all right. She understood, as she always has, what I was struggling to do. And although she did not know what was happening in my life, she did not break the bruised reed I had offered her but sought to help me weave it into a story, a real story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. “ We need to see Leslie grow and change,” she said. And suddenly, from the ancient dust of the playground at Calvin H. Wiley School, there sprang up a small army of seventh-grad Amazons, led by the dreadful Pansy Something-or-Other who had terrorized my life when I was nine and not too hard to terrify. “You must convince us,” Ann Beneduce added, “that Jesse has the mind of an artist.” This seemed harder, for I certainly don’t have Ann’s kind of artistic vision. I started bravely, if pompously, reading the letters of Vincent Van Gogh, and when they didn’t help, I went, as I often do, to my children. “David,” I asked, feeling like a spy, “why don’t you ever draw pictures from nature?” And my ten-year old artist-nature lover replied, “I can’t get the poetry of the trees.” It is the only line of dialogue that I have ever consciously taken from the mouth of a living person and out into the mouth of a fictitious one. It doesn’t usually work, but that time it seemed to. I have never been happier in my life than I was those weeks I was revising the book. It was like falling happily if a little crazily in love. I could hardly wait to begin in the morning and would regularly forget about lunch. The valley of the shadow which I had passed through so fearfully in the spring had, in the fall, become a hill of rejoicing. This time when I sent the manuscript off to Virginia I said: “I know that love is blind for I have just mailed you a flawless manuscript.” In time, of course, my vision was restored. I no longer imagine the book to be without flaws, but I have never ceased to love the people of this book-even the graceless Brenda and the inarticulate Mrs. Aarons. And, oh, May Belle, will you ever make queen? I still mourn for Leslie and when children ask me why she had to die, I want to weep, because it  is a question for which I have no answer. It is a strange and wonderful thing to me that other people who do not even know me love Jesse Aarons and Leslie Burke. I have given away my own fear and pain and faltering faith and have been repaid a hundredfold in loving compassion from readers like you. As the prophet Hosea says, the Valley of Trouble has been turned into the Gate of hope. Theodore Gill has said that  “the artist is the one who gives form to difficult visions.” This statement comes alive for me when I pore over Peter Spier’s Noah’s Ark. The difficult vision is not the destruction of the world. We’ve had too much practice imagining that. The difficult vision which Mr. Spier has given form to is that in the midst of the destruction as well as beyond it there is life and humor and caring along with a lot of manure shoveling. For me those final few words “and he planted a vineyard” ring with the same joy as”… he found his supper waiting for him and it was still hat.” In talking with children who have read Bridge to Terabithia, I have met several who do not like the ending. They resent the fact that Jesse would build a bridge into the secret kingdom which he and Leslie had shared. The thought of May Belle following in the footsteps of Leslie is bad enough, but the hint that the thumb-sucking Joyce Ann may come as well is totally abhorrent to these readers. How could I allow Jesse to build a bridge for the unworthy? They ask me. Their sense of what is fitting and right and just is offended. I hear my young critics out and do not try to argue with them, for I know as well as they do that May Belle is not Leslie, nor will she be. But perhaps some day they will understand Jesse’s bridge as an act of grace which he built, not because of who May Belle was, but because of who he himself had become crossing the gully into Terabithia. I allowed hime to build the bridge because I dare to believe with the prophet Hosea that the very valley where evil and despair defeat us can become a gate of hope-it there is a bridge. In closing, I want to explain the Japanese word on the dedication page of Bridge to Terabithia. The word is banzai, which some of you will remember from old wars movies. I am very annoyed when writers throw in Italian and German phrases that I can’t understand, but suddenly as I wrote the dedication to this book, banzai seemed to bethe only word I knew that was appropriate. The two characters which make the word up say “all years,” but the word itself combines the meaning of our English word “Hooray” with the ancient salute to royalty, “Live forever!” it is cry of triumph and joy, a word full of hope in the midst of the world’s contrary evidence. It is the word I wanted to say through bridge to Terabithia. It is a word that I think Leslie Burke world have liked. It is my salute to all of you whose lives are bridges for the young. Banzai!

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