The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": Of Ogres and New Beginnings

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Of Ogres and New Beginnings

Ok, after all this talk of self mutilation and my (and every other mom's) worries about what, exactly, teenagers are going to find out there, my daughter unintentionally lightened the mood. She's not returning to school until mid-September due to construction on her building, so she has had plenty of time to think about what fifth grade might have in store.

"Are you scared?" Christopher asked her at dinner. "'Cause fifth grade stinks. It's when I first starting really hating school."

"I'm only scared of one thing," Emma, who is quite used to the drama of teen speak, said.

"Boys," Philip offered, "the ones who push."

"Nope. Worse."

We all looked up. Emma has had issues with boys in general, and the ones who push specifically. This has been her number one pet peeve since kindergarten.

"So what are you afraid of?" I asked, trying not to sound worried (you can imagine what was going through my head at that exact moment).

"Ogres," she responded matter-of-factly. "I am really, really scared of them."

"New Jersey doesn't have a whole lot of ogres," I reassured her. "At least, I've never seen one. I think they hate beaches."

Emma sighed. "Mom, it's not like you know who they are. They hide it. Remember that story we read, about the women who were witches but only in secret?"

(We had read the Roald Dahl story over the summer aptly titled, "The Witches")

"I remember."

"They can look just like you and me. Well," (and this really cracked her up), "not like ME, but maybe like you. That's the scary part. You just don't know who they are."

Ogres. I had almost forgotten about them.

When her brothers began smiling, Emma admonished them, "If you laugh at an ogre,or if you don't believe in them, they get mad, then they come after you first. I'm just going to walk right by them and not think anything. Nothing at all. I'm just going to go blank so they don't think anything when they see me. Then they can't get me."

At least she's got a plan.

6 comments:

Marcia said...: She sounds like she's got a really good imagination for fantasy. Yet -- there's more than fantasy going on. We read about the supernatural in our novels, and we hear about it in our religions, and we sort of buy it but don't really. Sometimes we've almost GOT to operate on the assumption some of it's true. It would seem too naive or narrow not to.; Thursday, 04 September, 2008
Anne Spollen said...: Right, Marcia. I think there's a whole lot more around us than we might realize or know how to understand - yet.

I think for kids, the "ogre" (monsters and all the rest) are just fears they can't express. My personal ogre, right now, is the idea of her becoming her brothers' ages!; Thursday, 04 September, 2008
Mary Witzl said...: That Roald Dahl story really got to my kids -- especially the fact that the little boy never changed back into a boy, but remained a mouse, to die with his grandmother. And wasn't the witches' spit blue? Ewww.

But your little girl has a lovely, lively imagination, and how sweet that is! And no way do I let my feet get too close to my bed when I climb in at night, 'cause I KNOW what's under there when the lights are off!; Friday, 05 September, 2008
Anne Spollen said...: Yes! Emma has a good vocab because she's the youngest and prefers the company of teenagers and adults. Sometimes because she listens to alternative rock music (as opposed to Hannah and the Jonas Brothers) and uses certain words, people assume she's doesn't have the usual kid terrors. But boy, does she ever...that story has really lingered, especially when one of my friends bought her the film version with Angelica Houston. She is also thoroughly terrified that the happy people who work at her school secretly tug their faces off at night to reveal their...fill in the blank.

But that's the power of good writing - it affects you after the story is done.; Saturday, 06 September, 2008
TerriRainer said...: Ogres...not something any of my kids have voiced concerns about...YET!

I remember being a child and afraid of ghosts. I didn't live in an old house, and I often played in the cemetery that was behind our house (a field seperated the two), but ONLY during the day.

I think it was all the "ghost stories" that were told around camp fires.

My kids aren't so much scared of them, as they don't want any around!

We lived in a house that was, shall we say, ACTIVE. And now they miss impressing their friends with cups flying off of counters, but closet doors no longer open on their own at night, which is a GOOD thing!

:) Terri; Monday, 08 September, 2008
Anne Spollen said...: Emma has that kind of imagination. When a door opens, she looks at me and says, "It's ok, Mom, it's probably just a spirit looking for a friend."

But a house that was ACTIVE! You should write about that. So many of the teens we know are really interested in any kind of ghost, haunting, etc.; Tuesday, 09 September, 2008

Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

Order Light Beneath Ferns here.

Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

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