Fall 2007 - YALSA - American Library Association

Margaret A. Edwards Award Acceptance Speech
rent myth: the figure (and yes, though it is
sexist, the mythic hero seems always to be
male) who perceives something wrong in
the world and who therefore is compelled
to undertake a quest.
Picture the boy in South Carolina. I
know nothing about him beyond what his
teacher told me. He’s an eighth grader. He’s
disruptive, disaffected, disadvantaged. He’ll
be a drop-out soon.
But I am a very visual person. My
mind creates images. I picture him African
American. I don’t know his ethnicity, but
I know where he lives—a place with a
largely African American population—and
that’s how he appears in my mind. I see a
lanky black boy with large sneakers, restless
legs, bored eyes, forced to sit in a classroom
with inadequate resources—this is a
poor rural area—a classroom with nothing
that seems relevant to him, nothing that
holds his interest.
I see him sprawled at his desk, legs in
the aisle. I see him yawn and fiddle with a
pencil and gaze out the window, or glance
at the clock, when the teacher begins to
read a story and it is about a boy.
But because he has a mind, and an
imagination—because all kids do, all
humans do—he begins to see himself in
the fictional boy. Something feels familiar.
The boy in the story is scared. He’s worried
about what is going to happen to him.
His parents don’t seem to care. But the
boy, the fictional boy, Jonas, senses that
something is wrong in his world.
Well, the boy in the classroom, the
one slouched in his desk, is scared, too.
His own world sucks. His own parents—
assuming he has them in his life—do their
best, but are not a source of wisdom or
comfort. He hasn’t a clue what his own
future holds. He suspects it holds nothing.
He begins to listen to the story about
the scared, uncertain boy.
Then the boy in the book meets a man.
This is part of the structure of myth,
of course. The hero encounters a mentor—
often it is someone with magical powers.
Jonas, in the book, has this experience.
He meets a man who has amazing powers
and who is able to give him something
I thought about what memory means, what it does,
how we use it—and of course, what would happen if
we let go of it. If we chose to do that. I sat down to
write a story that grappled with those questions.
intangible, something mysterious, not yet
explainable.
The boy in the classroom, listening,
maybe less restless, attentive by now,
knows in his heart that he is not going to
have an opportunity to meet a bearded
man who will be his mentor. Maybe there
have been people in his past—a Cub Scout
leader once, a Little League coach, maybe,
who tried—but there had been no connection
for him; they tried to make him
conform, to follow their rules, and it didn’t
work for him, and he dropped out and
drifted away.
But something is happening that he
is unaware of. He has met a teacher who is
magically transferring excitement to him,
and a sense of wonder.
So we have a boy who is himself a
Jonas. He is a mythic hero, a young boy
caught in a world that offers him little, that
is in many ways a sick society; and through
a mentor—a teacher—a Giver—he begins
to undertake his own journey, as Jonas does.
There are other stock situations in
myth. There is a threshold that the hero
must cross in order to enter the unknown.
Jonas gets on a bike and crosses a
bridge on his way to Elsewhere; the young
boy in South Carolina picks up a telephone
on a snowy day.
Myth requires a journey. They both
set out.
Myth requires that they encounter
obstacles, entertain doubts, that they
despair and feel all is lost. We know, those
of us who know The Giver, that Jonas
experiences all of those things.
We don’t know the boy in South
Carolina. But we know the rural South.
We know our culture. We know what the
world offers a semi-educated, disaffected
boy like him. And so we know that he, too,
is going to experience crushing defeats and
terrible despair.
But for now, during two weeks in
February, he makes that mythic journey
with a fictional character.
There is a moment when Jonas feels
like giving up, like giving in:
He got off [the bicycle] and let it
drop sideways into the snow. For
a moment he thought how easy it
would be to drop beside it himself,
to let himself and Gabriel slide into
the softness of snow, the darkness
of night, the warm comfort of sleep.
But the trials that a mythic hero
undergoes test him and reveal his true
nature. So it is, with Jonas:
He pressed his hands into Gabriel’s
back and tried to remember
sunshine. For a moment it seemed
that nothing came to him, that his
power was completely gone. Then
24 YALS | Young Adult Library Services | Fall 2007