Articulate Experience
Articulate Experience
Pater Familias
On this episode of Articulate Experience— three writers who’ve mourned the father-child relationship they wish they’d had.
Sarah Gancher has channeled her grief about her father’s death into music, comedy, and international travel. Today, his spirit lives on in her, and her son.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gregory Pardlo Jr. often features toxic father-son dynamics in his work. Writing has helped him heal and learn from his own dad’s mistakes.
When Kate DiCamillo started writing books for kids, she was able to reimagine and reclaim her own childhood. Her father was a magical, mercurial man, who was often missing in action.
- [01:14] Sarah Gancher
- [15:46] Gregory Pardlo Jr.
- [24:20] Kate DiCamillo
Articulate Experience examines stories of humanity, resilience, and wisdom through the words of some of today’s greatest writers.
Articulate Experience is a production of the Articulate Foundation.
More at articulateshow.org
Welcome to Articulate Experience, the show that examines stories of humanity, resilience, and wisdom through the words of some of today's greatest writers. I'm Jim Cotter. In this episode, three writers whose fathers have had an outsized impact on their life and work.
The playwright Sarah Gancher, is driven by the belief that laughter is a spiritual act, a philosophy she inherited from her own late father.
SARAH GANCHER: He was very, very funny and we were very similar. That was a thing I got all the time during my childhood, was just like, you're so much like your dad.
The Pulitzer Prize winning in poet Gregory Parlow observes and dissects emotional subjects in a way that reads like reason, especially when the subject hits closest to home.
GREGORY PARDLO: Yes, I have a problem with my father. There are points when I'm going to be angry and uh, and I'm trying to normalize that.
And, children's author Kate DiCamillo writes to heal from the absence of her father in her own childhood and beyond.
KATE DICAMILLO: I've taken all of this chaos, all of this hurt and bewilderment that you feel is a kid and you poured into a vison, then you can make it into something beautiful.
That's all coming up on Articulate Experience.
—-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------SARAH GANCHER
Sarah Gancher is something of an enigma. As a writer, she's contributed to the comedy series, The Colbert Rapport, created study guides for the Metropolitan Opera, composed two musicals with the rock band, the Benson’s, and written several highly acclaimed plays. She's also a classically trained violinist and along the way has worked for circuses. Gancher’s life has never felt linear and she's been fearless with each change in direction. This stems, at least in part from her early home life in Oakland, California. Mom and dad, she says, were unadulterated hippies.
SARAH GANCHER: My parents literally met at a commune on the Haight-Ashbury during the summer of Love <laugh> at a Buddhist like meditation. And my dad's friends told him, you've gotta go see this cute little redhead that is <laugh> translating with this monk. I think you'll really like her.
The two fell in love and ultimately had two daughters. Their eldest, Sarah was enchanted by her father's gift for spinning a yarn.
SARAH GANCHER: He was a writer, but he was not a published writer. He was an environmentalist. He wrote for Friends of the Earth Magazine. He was the editor-in-chief of, and then he became the editor-in-chief of Sierra Club Magazine and then Computer Land Magazine.
So it's this classical sort of like Bay Area, like hippie to tech kind of arc. But he was a real storyteller. He would tell me these bedtime stories that lasted for like years that that would sort of change and grow and evolve and bring on new characters and go to different planets and all this kind of stuff.
He was also a musician, so I grew up playing with his band. They practiced every Wednesday night in our garage when I was little. I would go to bed, bed listening to them and then when I was older I would play with them and I learned to improvise that way.
JIM COTTER: Fiddle?
SARAH GANCHER: Fiddle. Yeah.
JIM COTTER: What did he play?
SARAH GANCHER: He played guitar and he was a songwriter and,
JIM COTTER: And was it a jam band, or…?
SARAH GANCHER: They did a lot of my dad's original songs and they played out sometimes, but not very much. It was mostly was sort of like a social thing. He, he was really at the center of this big amazing group of friends that had all become friends during the sixties in the Bay Area and all sort of grew up to become a wide variety of things from like a carpenter or a nurse to like a high powered lawyer, to like a gardener. It was kind of all over the map, but they all sort of loved music. They all loved laughing. He was very, very funny and we were very similar. That was a thing I got all the time during my childhood was just like, “you're so much like your dad”.
Gancher adored her father and reveled in the comparison, but when she was in high school, he got sick with colon cancer. Though he was given just months to live, he survived for two years. During that time, he indulged his long-held writerly ambitions and began working on a book. But he died before he could finish it.
At 17 years old, Gancher had lost the most important man in her life. Her world was riven apart and it was years before she felt ready to read the story he'd left behind. Around that time, she began studying jazz—the music her father had played and loved. It freed her. It taught her to improvise and it helped her to grieve her father's death.
SARAH GANCHER: I had a huge ocean of grief inside of me that I was not ready to put into words in any way, shape or form. And it had to get out somehow. And the classical pieces that I knew how to play were just not cutting it.
I had one slow movement of Lao's Symphony Espanol that I would lay over and over and over and over and over and over again until my mom would say, you can't play that in the house anymore. And then I would go to the Bart station in San Francisco and I would play it over and over and over. I once had a homeless man in the station give me $40 <laugh> cuz he just saw me playing this one thing over and over and sobbing. And I guess he felt sorry for me. I had my eyes closed by the time I had opened them. It was like too late to be like, don't, don't gimme money. But you know, when I started to improvise in jazz, it was a huge relief that I felt like I could finally say what it was that I actually wanted to say without having to like filter it through somebody else's words.
Over time, Gancher learned to accept life without her father. And about a year after crossing the country to study at Bennington College in Vermont, she finally felt ready to read his unfinished book:
SARAH GANCHER: It was a novel about the Three Stooges and it imagined that the Three Stooges were members of a Jewish Buddhist Dowist comedy cult in Azerbaijan <laugh>. So focused on Shemp the fourth stooge who was the brother of Curly and Mo. And it imagined sort of Shemp starting at this monastery coming to New York, setting out in Vaudeville with his brothers to try to like spread this religion that believed in enlightenment through laughter. And then they go to Hollywood and it all comes to a head on Oscar night and, and so forth like that.
It was unfinished, but he wrote probably the first third to a half of it. And I read it and it was like talking to him again. It was his voice, this voice I had been so starved for. And then also that reflected so much of him, so much of what I knew of him and missed of him and really stemmed from actually a lot of our conversations that I was having with him as a teenager. So overnight I was like, “this is it. I am devoting my life to comedy. That's what I'm doing now.” I'm gonna study committee del Arte and I'm gonna study clowning and I'm gonna study the great silent comedians and I'm just gonna do every kind of training, every kind of learning that I possibly can. I've got,
JIM COTTER: Hence the circus then? That’s where the circus comes in?
SARAH GANCHER: Yes. That's that, that was, that
JIM COTTER: Was okay. Now this is starting to make sense.
SARAH GANCHER: Yeah, that's where the circus came into it. I also got a job as the props master for Big Apple Circus so that I could watch the clowns every day, you know, and I wrote shows for standup comedians. I directed a couple of circus acts and like avant garde circuses in Brooklyn. I mean, I just, I really went to the hilt with it.
JIM COTTER: And that was, that was just to keep the connection with your dad? Do you think that was being motivated with that?
SARAH GANCHER: Uh, I think that I was really was like, “I believe it is a spiritual act to make somebody laugh. And I wanna be able to move people to this point where that happens with humor and with comedy where it's like I have this idea about the world and then I have another one. They directly conflict, but they're both true. And that clash releases laughter, it releases joy, it changes your body. I was just completely addicted to this concept, but I think,
JIM COTTER: But have any of these theories ever been articulated by your dad? These, the spiritual ideas that you were coming to. Were those conversations you had had or was that something you took from him by osmosis? Or was it just completely your own thinking do you think?
SARAH GANCHER: Some of it was in the book. Some of it was in some conversations that we had had. And some of it was just me thinking more deeply and trying to be like, okay, if I take this big sort of bold heading idea and I try to like enumerate that for myself, really break down what, like what that would actually mean in practice and like how this actually all works, what would that mean? So I did a lot of thinking on my own about how does laughter work, how does comedy work, how are laughs generated? I got very heady about it, which is I think many comedians and comedy people might totally roll their eyes at, but I,
JIM COTTER: There’s a certain craf- like approach to it, right? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. You, you're learning how to play scales before you play a concerto.
SARAH GANCHER: That's right. That's right.
By the time Gancher was in her late twenties, she'd moved on from comedy and was living with her husband in New York scraping by on an exhausting slate of freelance gigs, which included writing for the Metropolitan Opera website. But the couple had long fostered a fantasy of someday moving to Budapest where they'd once visited friends and observed its rich culture and affordability… until one night when things came to a head.
SARAH GANCHER: We were walking down the street to our apartment after like a really long day. We were both exhausted and he, he turned to me and said, “you wanna just move to Budapest?” And I said, “yeah, I do”
JIM COTTER: <laugh> and off you went.
SARAH GANCHER: And yeah, we got an apartment in Budapest and I was just riding every day, all day. I got a little bit homesick a couple months into living there. And so I joined a bluegrass band <laugh>. So I sort of became a part of this Hungarian bluegrass scene.
They could like sing with a perfect American accent, but then we would end the song and they'd be like, “what does it mean big wheel keep on rolling, like it's a truck?” Like that was a real trip. And then I stumbled into this amazing circle of friends that were sort of young Jewish people that were living and working in and around the Seventh District in Budapest, which is the historical ghetto in Budapest. And at the time it was all very centered around this one place, it's called sirály, which means the seagull. And the original place was covered in quotes on the inside from the seagull in Hungarian, which really appealed to me.
And it was a squat in the middle of the seventh district. It was right on Király Street.. It was sort of in the middle of everything. And this group of kids had basically taken over this three story building. They had built a theater and a music venue in the basement and then the ground floor was like a cafe during the day and a bar at night. And then the top floor was sort of like art gallery/event space/bar overflow. And it was just the coolest place I had ever been. I was just would look at the calendar and be like, “I want to actually see all of this.”
And everybody that I met there, at least to me as an outsider was interesting. I would just sort of sit for hours and have long intense, interesting conversations about every kind of thing. And it became sort of like my home base while I was there. It was really through that place and the people that I met there that I got so interested in the history of the neighborhood.
JIM COTTER: What, what were the things about Hungarian culture that you think you adapted and what made them attractive, and what were the things you almost subliminally took on board?
SARAH GANCHER: Hmm. Slowing down and trying to like take a look at the big universe of ideas in front of me and really try to synthesize some things into something meaningful and that that sort of felt like something that people were into there and that I think I, I internalized in a certain way. And the lifestyle at least that I experienced among the young people that I was hanging out with there of taking time to sort of spend all night talking and debating and wondering and dreaming. That's the thing I miss all the time. That's truly wonderful.
And I only left Hungary because I got into NYU. I was told by some friends that I was talking to about graduate admissions that it would take a lot of tries to get into grad school. So I thought, “okay good, I'm ready to go in like three years or something like that. So I'll start applying now.” Then I got in right away and then like, “oh no, now we have to move back to New York.” <laugh>.
JIM COTTER: How long did you spend in Hungary, finally?
SARAH GANCHER: It was only like two years and change, you know? Right, right. It was but but it was a time that had a lot of weight in my life, you know, because it was so profoundly different from what had come before and it was so different from what came after. And you know, it was a short time but it was a big time.
Gancher used her time in NYU's MFA dramatic writing program to craft an ambitious project called The Seventh— a series of seven plays, installations and site-specific performances exploring the complex past and present of Budapest's Seventh District. Gradually, she began to come into her own as a playwright.
Amongst other works, she produced Mission Drift, a musical which travels through space and time in pursuit of the soul of American capitalism. Her 2020 play Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy made the New York Times Best Theater List of 2020. It tells the story of Russian writers who create fake news for social media.
And though she never finished her father's book, Sarah Gancher did find a place for it at the heart of her play I'll Get You Back Again, which details the raucous reunion of a once beloved hippie rock band in the Bay Area.
SARAH GANCHER: Once I had gathered enough skills and enough confidence, I was able to think about my father and think about his friends and think about this sort of world of passionate far out hippies, <laugh> in the context of this newly changed San Francisco Bay area that had sort of suddenly become the Detroit of tech, this new sort of tech mecca and had changed totally and was almost unrecognizable in a certain way and I thought, “how could I possibly sort of make people understand the thing that's been lost as this hippie world is washed away to sea.” And the distance between what is now and, and what was then in a way that doesn't feel cheap or hackneyed, you know. So much of what we is it about hippies in popular culture is really just kind of like jokes. It's like Shaggy from Scooby Doo or something like that.
But there's actually so much beauty in that subculture and so many specifics that have been sort of washed out and lost to time. And I thought, “oh, you know, I could use my dad's book. I can go back to that book and I can build a play actually around that philosophy” and it'll have to be very, very funny so hopefully people will laugh a lot, but it will also be about trying to laugh through tears cuz it will also be about fundamentally, even if I never talk about it, like the loss of my dad.
And so this idea that, you know, if you're gonna transcend something, if you're gonna move past something, right, you're moving through a thing. There's something that you're trying to get past, right? I had this idea that, “would it be possible for us to both really feel pain and really feel grief and then also let go of it in a moment of laughter to feel those things at the exact same time.” So then, then I wrote a play and, and I tried to do that. <laugh>,
JIM COTTER: Was it some sort of a solution to this extraordinary grief and pain and loss and?
SARAH GANCHER: Yeah, it was,
JIM COTTER: And feeling of having in some ways lost a limb, I imagine, almost?
SARAH GANCHER: Yeah. You know, it was in many ways. And I think that there were a lot of feelings that did not go away but calmed down when they were spoken out loud, you know? So that grief is still with me. It will always be with me, but it's not quite as loud anymore.
And to be honest, I actually don't want it to go away. I mean, it's like really become one of my engines. And even if it wasn't an engine, I, I mean, you're right that feeling that loss is a way to still feel him with me.
I also think a lot of it, when I had my son, it also got worse in some ways and then calmed down in other ways. And he's very, very much like my father. So like that's also kind of remarkable. From the time that my son started to walk, he's been trying to make people laugh, you know? And his name is Isaac, which means “laughter”. And that's very important to him somehow…he's seven now—he loves nothing more than to just fall down into a prat fall to make somebody laugh.
Now with a family of her own, Sarah Gancher is still every bit her father's daughter, continuing his story by living his dream and writing to find laughter in grief, music in laughter and truth of the center of it all.
—-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gregory Pardlo Jr. writes to examine the past, reconcile the present, and imagine the future. The Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet is celebrated for his ability to make his own deeply felt and specific experiences ring true in a way that feels universal.
All three of his books have expertly woven together vivid snapshots of childhood, adulthood, and identity. At the heart of each is always a complex dynamic between a father and a son — though not always the literal reflection of his own upbringing.
Pardlo has often written about his troubled relationship with his late father. Gregory Pardlo Sr. was a brilliant and charismatic man, whose legacy of activism, abuse, and American masculinity left his two children with much to untangle.
Pardlo Jr. says the act of creation has itself been cathartic, and that today he holds no grudges against his namesake. Yet even with healing, Greg Sr. remains a powerful influence on his son’s life and work— often by offering a model of how not to be(have).
GREGORY PARDLO: After my parents divorced and my father was starting to be sick, to get really sick, I said, “you're not even 60. You have an opportunity to get healthy.” And I suggested going back to school and he said, “it's too late. That's absurd.” I believe, no, we can create a different story. We don't have to follow that pattern.
And Pardlo’s willingness to start over has served him well. Today he's a professor at Rutgers University and a Doctoral candidate at City University of New York. But at 18 he had all but given up on school as the child of two very young activist parents. Enlisting in the Marines was a bold act of rebellion as well as an exercise in his own imagination. Pardlo left the service long ago. But he says that what he learned there fundamentally changed him.
GREGORY PARDLO: I got so much out of Marine Corps bootcamp, you know, this is stealing discipline, the discipline, the stability, <laugh>. So I I, the way I grew up, our family life, you know, I was like, I was raised by wolves. My parents were kids and we were figuring it out. But I'd go to school on my own, come home on my own, feed myself. We ate dinner here or there as we could. You know, the, the old TV dinner every so often.
So having a ritual, having a, a reliable schedule, having a reliable social structure framework in which to operate proved to be really comforting to me. I think it has a lot to do with my, well, it wasn't called A-D-D at the time, I was just labeled hyperactive, but I'm pretty certain what I have is a form of Attention Deficit Disorder. Having the Marine Corps structure really settled me down and allowed me to think through problems. It wasn't just a structure actually, it was also the, the physical training. And in some way the some ways the violence of that structure, right, the threat of that structure.
JIM COTTER: That's what I was gonna come to, yeah.
GREGORY PARDLO: Yeah.
JIM COTTER:You don't have a choice.
GREGORY PARDLO:You don't have a choice.
JIM COTTER: They say jump, you say, yes, sir.
GREGORY PARDLO:Right? Right. And all throughout my life growing up, there was always a a back door. “Mom, I really don't wanna do this.” “Oh, okay!” “Dad, come on, this sucks.” “All right, fine.”
No such luck for his own kids. Pardlo has two teenaged daughters who feel the influence of their dad's Marine Corps training every day.
GREGORY PARDLO: So my daughter's doing her homework last night, in fact, and she's writing this essay on Malala, and she's frustrated that it's not working out. It's a three page essay and she's got five pages of notes. And I'm like, it's, you know, it's,” it's practically done. Just whip it in the shape and go to bed.” I come back 10 minutes later, she’s, her head's on her desk, she's weeping, <laugh> very lightly. And I said, “this has to get done. Quit your winging.” You know, this is like <laugh> buck up kid and, and get the work done.
This is the Marine Corps training. There isn't an option. At some point you're on your own. And I try and prepare my kids for those moments when there's no one to else to rely on. There's, you know, you will in most cases be alone in the responsibility of getting something done.
Pardlo can be as to-the-point in person as he is on the page. He observes and dissects emotional subjects in a way that reads like reason. This is especially true of his 2018’s memoir, Air Traffic, which also explores a pivotal moment in his father’s life. On August 3rd, 1981, Gregory Pardlo, Sr. and around 13,000 other members of PATCO, the air traffic controllers’ union, went on strike. President Ronald Reagan ordered them back to work.
Most refused, and were fired, including Pardlo’s dad.
GREGORY PARDLO: He felt his job was worth more than the pilot's job. Um, but I think throughout the union, throughout PATCO there was a sense of jealousy. There was a, a resentment that they were, that the controllers were not treated with the same deference that the pilots got. They wanted their dignity. They wanted their work to be respected. I get it. Yeah.
After losing his job, Pardlo Sr, succumbeded to depression and addiction, draining the family's resources and developing a toxic relationship with his son. In Air Traffic, Pardlo Jr. Didn't hold back.
EXCERPT, AIR TRAFFIC
The father I grew up with still resented the competing demands of an unplanned offspring. I was the mistake that he felt he was nobly taking responsibility for. And I was thus made to suffer the flexing of big Greg's narcissism in all its demonstrative and petty renditions. I don't mean this in a self-pitying way, whereas he wanted from me a show of gratitude, I studied him, he interpreted my scrutiny as insubordination. This made our lives adversarial.
GREGORY PARDLO: People have said, they've criticized me about my depiction of my father,
JIM COTTER: And he was still alive when this came out?.
GREGORY PARDLO: He was still alive. There was no way he was gonna read it anyway. Healthy, If he could have been entirely healthy, he would, he might have skimmed through it, but just, uh, however I depicted him, it would've fed his ego. So there is no, no such thing as
JIM COTTER: My kid wrote a book about me. My kid wrote a book guys!
GREGORY PARDLO: That's it.
JIM COTTER: Don't read it.
PARDLO: <laugh>. Yeah. There's no such thing in his, in his mind, there's no such, no such thing as bad publicity.
JIM COTTER: That now explains to me why there was never any nastiness in your parting of who your father was. It was that you were examining his character and you weren't attacking him in the same way that say a teenager would.
GREGORY PARDLO: Right.
JIM COTTER: And you never have.
GREGORY PARDLO: Well, that's not true. I mean I certainly did when I was a teenager.
JIM COTTER: Right, but I mean the person who wrote about it.
GREGORY PARDLO: Right, yeah, and that came also in the process of writing the book was in going back and thinking about my relationship to my kids and how I want them to be empowered and then going back and applying it to my father and accepting the fact that he was somebody who did the best as I think people are, we're doing the best that we can with the information that we have available, right, and what the information my father had available and the world as it revealed itself to him suggested certain things.
I don't have to agree with those things but I do respect the fact that he had a certain reality that he was responding to.
I I like to think that all through the book, I am admitting I am throwing on caveat after caveat that yes, I have a problem with my father. And, and you know, that's the point of this book is I'm working through this aggression. There are points when I'm going to be angry. And, and I think it's, I am perfectly justified in being pissed off at my father. Right. I own it. And, and I love my father desperately. Right? And it is part of the package. And I'm trying to normalize that, right? We have our relationships and, and the, the idea that the text should sanitize memory or eulogize the past in, in any way is offensive to me. It is my prerogative to depict him however I want, because I'm the one writing the story.
Gregory Pardlo takes seriously the power of being both protagonist and author, and with imagination as his compass, he's living out a story that his own daughters will someday hopefully be proud to have been a part of. Be proud to tell.
—------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Children’s author Katie DiCamillo is an architect of whimsical worlds that are regulated by everyday magic. In the past two decades, she's written more than 25 books and has twice won the Newbury Medal for children's literature. Her characters run the gamut— a courageous mouse from Tales of Desperaux, an organ grinder and his monkey who experienced homelessness in a story called Great Joy. There's even a squirrel in Flora and Ulysses with a heart of gold and a penchant for poetry.
DiCamillo attributes the great breadth of her creativity in part to an unstructured process. But wherever she begins, she says, she always ends up in a similar place.
KATE DICAMILLO: I have a word, a phrase, a name, sometimes. An image sometimes. And I don't know, it just always feels to me like, you know, a defining rod. You hold it over this word and it moves. It's like, “okay, dig here.”
JIM COTTER: Yeah.
KATE DICAMILLO: But, and, and, and I'm digging, but it's, it's in a different spot. But I'm still getting to the same thing every time, which is this missing parent.
Katie DiCamillo’s father, Lou, was missing when she was five. He was supposed to close up his orthodontic practice in Philadelphia and join his wife and two children in Florida— whose warm climate had been prescribed by doctors as a so-called “geographical treatment” for young Katie's chronic pneumonia.
KATE DICAMILLO: He was not gone, he never moved down there, but he would show up. We didn't know when he was gonna show up. Sometimes when he said he was gonna be there, he wasn't there. And other times, I, like, I remember having the measles and looking up through my bedroom window and seeing him walk through the orange grove and his suit. He always traveled in a black suit. Um, he'd just come in to Orlando and then hitchhiked, um, to Claremont <laugh>. So it was a very,
JIM COTTER: How thriving was this orthodontic practice? <laugh>.
DICAMILLO: Well, he sold the practice. And then,
COTTER: So, there's another woman in there somewhere, right?
DICAMILLO: There is another woman,
JIM COTTER: Or other women, I think.
KATE DICAMILLO: Yeah. And so then, uh, we got to the point where, okay, I'll take the kids for the summer. And so he would drive down and, uh, drive us back up. And that's when we found out that he was living with somebody else. Although my parents never got divorced.
JIM COTTER: And had he been “carrying on with her,” as we'd say in Ireland while he was still married to your mother and she was living in Philadelphia?
KATE DICAMILLO:We don't know. We don't know.
JIM COTTER: And was that stressful? Like, would you have rather not had, uh, gone to the trouble?
KATE DICAMILLO: It was terrifying. You know, it was, it was very clear that my mother was reluctant to release us and also very clear that she didn't have the power
JIM COTTER: To stop it.
KATE DICAMILLO: Yeah, to stop it. He was very mercurial, unpredictable, very charming. Um, both of us, my brother and I were both terrified.
JIM COTTER: And you are sort of on the tail end of those, as am I of those generations where fathers didn't really have to have a relationship with their kids.
KATE DICAMILLO: Right. And he, to his credit, they, like I said, they never divorced, but he sent money to my mother. He got me through college. So he, you know, he stepped up for that. And then a, as I became an adult, and I went a couple times as an adult to see him, it became increasingly difficult. You could only be his way in the world. There was no way to be yourself. It was crushing.
JIM COTTER: To what extent has how your father behaved in the world…has any of that spoken to how you don't want to be?
KATE DICAMILLO: Oh, of course.
JIM COTTER: Do you ever pinch yourself and go, hang on, that's dad there on my shoulder?
KATE DICAMILLO: Yes.
JIM COTTER: Interesting.
KATE DICAMILLO: I, there's a lot of him and me. And so yeah, I know how, I don't wanna do it so much about how he was in the world and I can feel those impulses in me. I think, “okay, that's not what I wanna do. That's not how I wanna go through this.”
JIM COTTER: There's a book out there for somebody called In Praise of Terrible Parents, you know, because well, if you can learn from the bad as, as much from the good, because example is example, right? What’s it said Baden Powell said, “there's no teaching to compare with example.” And it goes both ways. You can, you know, you can be brought up to be polite and to be kind, but equally you can be be shown cruelty and terribleness and then grow up to go, “well, I'm not, I don't wanna be like that.”
KATE DICAMILLO: Right. And, and, and you, you, you see that you can choose who you want.
JIM COTTER: We hope
KATE DICAMILLO: We hope
JIM COTTER: Some some of us.
KATE DICAMILLO: Some of us, yeah.
JIM COTTER: Because there's certainly, we have a, you know, a syndrome in Ireland, which is, which is which is everywhere, right. And we used to call it “good enough for my father,” which is sort of that, that cancerous lack of desire to, to to live, to be more in the world than he thought you might have been. You know, “my dad was a plumber, I'll be a plumber. Oh, good enough for my father.” You know, it's, it's sort of a,
KATE DICAMILLO: It's just like a, that's fascinating to me though, because I'm thinking about that and I'm thinking, you know, it, it's a classic, you know, immigrant story of like, my father's father was a shoemaker, so he sent him my dad to Franklin and Marshall, and then he sent him to University of Pennsylvania, said, “choose, be a doctor, be a lawyer.” Right? Those are your choices. And what my dad wanted was to write. So when you say good enough for my father, I like take it and turn it that way.
JIM COTTER: Did he ever articulate his, his frustration at not being a writer? Or, or did he actually sit down and write?
KATE DICAMILLO: He made up fairy tales for us. And sometimes he wrote those down. What he became obsessed with was learning to play the piano. And so that was where all that creative energy went.
DiCamillo’s mother Betty raised her and her brother Kurt. And through the uncertainty of her childhood, DiCamillo says her mother saw strength in her she didn't even know she had, and pushed her to use it. Early on little Kate was eager to learn how to read, but she had trouble with the phonics method her school was using. And so as usual, it was mom to the rescue.
KATE DICAMILLO: My mother is the one that bought the books, took me to the library, read to me,
JIM COTTER: And, and helped you read cuz you weren't a, a good reader when you were very little. Right?
KATE DICAMILLO: Right. I was so undone by the mysteries of phonics. It's just like, I have no idea what these people are talking about. And so what my mother did when I came home hysterical about this, because she was very, you know, matter of fact. “for the love of pete, calm down” and then gave me something that like not only charted the rest of my life, but gave me really, when I think about it, is psychologically like something that I needed saying, “you're smart.” She said that to me. “You're good at memorizing.” She knew me. And then she said, “we'll, find a way around it,” which is the most beautiful of all of those things. We'll find a way around it. I.E. there's really nothing wrong with you, we'll just do it in a different way. And so she made me flashcards with a word on each flashcard. And every day I'd come home and we'd go through that pile of words and I just memorized them. And
JIM COTTER: She was a really good mother. I mean, you're gonna say, “well, except for this” no, no, let me finish the sentence. I think it's because she imbued you with worth.
KATE DICAMILLO: Yeah. She saw who I was and she always saw me as very, very, very strong. It's just like, I can make myself be relentless.
This bullish determination would later become the backbone of DiCamillo’s writing career. After nearly a decade of identifying herself as a writer, yet refusing to put pen to paper, she discovered the key to becoming Indefatigably prolific was in her all along.
KATE DICAMILLO: I spent all that time, like wanting to do it, wanting to do it, wanting to do it, not doing it because what's worse than, you know, wanting something and then finding out you can't do it. It's terrifying. Right?
JIM COTTER: That's the fear, right? I that's,
KATE DICAMILLO: Oh, I think that's,
JIM COTTER: That's probably what keeps most people
KATE DICAMILLO: Right! That and the fact that when you do occasionally go in there and sit down and write something, it doesn't come out right. It doesn't matter who you are. I, I, I like, uh, quoting, uh, there's a book called Art and Fear and um, two authors, Orland and Bayles, those are their last names. And they talk about how there's one Mozart born every century, somebody who hears the music and puts it down on paper and then they say, “guess what? That's not you. So like, if you wanna make anything, it's, you have to give up on that idea of it coming out right the first time you sit down to do it.”
And in, in this culture, we, we think, oh, but if I have talent, you know, then, and if I'm supposed to be doing this, then it will, it will come out. Right? So, and it doesn't, and so you spend all this time thinking, I'm, I'm, “I think I can do it, but maybe I can't do it”. I think, and, and, and you don't wanna sit down and find out and
JIM COTTER: You're just frozen.
KATE DICAMILLO: You're frozen and, and, and, and if you're young, like I was, um, you're full of yourself. You're a bag of hot air talking about, um, how you're a writer. Because that's how I went around.
You know, I, I, you know, literally had the black turtleneck and told everybody, I'm a writer. I'm a writer. I'm a writer. Sat around looking bored and disdainful because that's the way writers are supposed to look, you know? And so at the time, this is how I tricked myself into it.
I ran, you know, I would run two miles a day. I, I had no grandiose desires of becoming “a runner.” It wasn't something that mattered to me. It was just something that I've made myself do it every day. And so as I approached 30, I thought, “here's this thing that I could care less about running. It's just something that I do." And yet I make myself do it every day, two miles. So this thing that I say that I wanna do and I'm not doing, I'll just do it the same way. I'll just sit down and I'll write. I'm not allowed to get up until I've done two pages.” They don't have to be any good, but I have to do two pages. Cuz I found that if you sat there and didn't have some, you would just sit there. So it's like you can't get up until you do two pages. So that's how I tricked myself.
Katie DiCamillo’s twenties went by in a flurry of odd jobs and nearly 500 rejection letters from publishers. In her early thirties, she followed a friend to Minneapolis to work at a book distribution center. But though she was only looking for a change of scene, it was there that she stumbled upon her calling.
KATE DICAMILLO: And then when I got the job at the warehouse, um, and was assigned to the third floor and started reading the kids' books and then tried the first kids' book and thought, I, I mean, I just remember thinking, “this is what I'm supposed to be doing. This is where I'm supposed to be.”
JIM COTTER: Am I correct that you have to preserve a certain amount of childlike quality to write for this audience?
KATE DICAMILLO: Yes, but it’s more like the books give that to me, getting to write these books gives me back that view of the world and that
JIM COTTER: and that permission.
KATE DICAMILLO: That permission. Yeah. And also getting to write the books is a huge gift because it's like, it's changed me. There's um, you know, there's this thing that Katherine Patterson, who is a wonderful writer of children's book, said that there's this kind of unspoken… you're duty bound to end with hope when you write for kids. And so I love what writing for kids has done to me as a human being. It's made me more hopeful and more aware of that peripheral magic. So yeah, it has given to me and changed me as a person to do this.
Writing her first children's novel, Because of Winn Dixie, was originally just a way for DiCamillo to cope with a battle of home sickness, missing her family in Florida in the midst of a harsh Minnesota winter. But Winn Dixie turned out to be a smash hit that exceeded DiCamillo’s highest expectations— today there are about 11 million copies in print in over two dozen languages. And in 2005, the book was beautifully adopted for the big screen.
With Winn Dixie, the floodgates opened. And since then, DiCamillo has come out with dozens more books. But over the same period, she also grew more distant from her father.
KATE DICAMILLO: As far as we knew he went to Saudi Arabia and we didn't hear anything from him for a year. No one knew where he was. And it turns out that he'd never gone. And that was the point at which I thought, “I can't, it's just not safe.”
JIM COTTER: Emotionally safe.
KATE DICAMILLO: Yeah.
JIM COTTER: Have you done the whole therapy thing or should I even ask? Like, have you
KATE DICAMILLO: Sure. You can ask him. Yeah, no, I did, I did do therapy. I was reluctant to do it cuz I thought
JIM COTTER: You'd lose your mojo.
KATE DICAMILLO: Exactly.
JIM COTTER: And did you, did you ever forgive him or did you ever feel that you had to?
KATE DICAMILLO: Of course. Yeah, yeah. You know, I, it, this is something that I heard on, On Being and he said, there are four things that you need to say to somebody who's dying. “Thank you. I love you. I forgive you. Do you forgive me?” And I heard that I was on the treadmill and I almost fell off the treadmill because it just like resonated so much with me. And I carried that around for a while. And this is when my father was still alive. And then I wrote him a letter and I said, thank you. I love you. I forgive you.
And because that was kind of like the child. I didn't ask that question of, “can you forgive me?” Because I thought the important things to say were that I, I loved him and I, he gave so much to me, so much to me. He was magical. He was, he gave me a, a lot, I was able to thank him for it. It was a miraculous thing to just write it out in my handwriting and send it.
And I sent it. And it might as well have gone by magical owl because like four days later, I, I got a letter back that said, “forgive me for what?” And <laugh>. And then that was when I knew that I had done the, the right thing.
JIM COTTER: That’s so interesting.
KATE DICAMILLO: But I felt the forgiveness and I, and him saying that didn't take it away is just like
JIM COTTER: No, no, It was perfect.
KATE DICAMILLO: Yeah. Because yeah, because, and it's like, but that, okay, there you are, you're still the person that you were. And I, you know, I see you in all your complexity and I see the huge gifts that you gave to me. And I'm grateful.
When Kate DiCamillo’s father died in 2019, she felt she’d said all she needed to say. As for the wounds left over from her childhood— those she transfigures into fiction.
KATE DICAMILLO: I'm so much happier if I can take the chaos of here and make it into the pattern of a story.
JIM COTTER: I like the word fact you used the word “pattern.” Cause I, like we are inherently pattern solvers,
KATE DICAMILLO: right?
JIM COTTER: Because the world is such chaos, we want to put order on it.
KATE DICAMILLO: Right.
JIM COTTER: And if we can see the patterns in something
KATE DICAMILLO: Right, right. It, it, it's like, “oh, okay, I've given it form.” I've taken all of this chaos, all of this hurt and bewilderment that you feel as a kid and you pour it into a vase and then you can make it into something beautiful.
JIM COTTER: Yeah.
KATE DICAMILLO: And, and you can give it shape and form.
JIM COTTER: And then you can give it to someone else, which is the real beauty.
KATE DICAMILLO: Yeah. And I think about that. I, wrote, oh it was a commencement address for a writing program, but talking about watching my best friend that I grew up with, she read Charlotte's Web all the time when she was a kid. I mean, she would finish the book and turn it over and start again.
And so I asked her, you know, as an adult, “what do you think that you were looking for as a kid?: And she said, “I don't know. I just, it wasn't that I thought it was gonna end differently, it was more like it was all so beautiful and I didn't think that I could bear it. And then I would read it and find that I could bear it.”
And it's like, that's it. I mean that's, that's a beautiful summation of what writing can do. You think that kids don't need that? Kids need that so much. It's just like, “okay, somebody's telling me the truth and is trusting me with the truth. And that makes me feel like I can bear it.”.
For more than 20 years, Kate DiCamillo has reimagined her own childhood on the page, finding healing line by line, while at the same time creating fantastical childhood-defining worlds for millions of young people the world over to explore.
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On the next Articulate Experience…writers driven by their deeply felt love of language…
Since the 1970s, poet Cheryl Boyce Taylor has written to preserve and celebrate her native Carribbean dialect—
CHERYL BOYCE TAYLOR: So my legacy is to keep that culture and that language alive
Tori Marchiony reports on how, long before Kory Stamper became a Merriam-Webster lexicographer, she was a kid who was a nerd for words—
KORY STAMPER: I really fell in love with the sound of words more than I fell in love with the meaning of words
For the Irish poet Paul Muldoon, becoming a wordsmith was not only a point of personal pride, but of cultural identity—
PAUL MULDOON: The history of Irish literature is truly remarkable. I mean, by any standard.
And, scholarly translations are a battle between literal accuracy and literary interpretation—
ESTHER ALLEN: You have to create something that’s real and alive on the page, and that isn’t just a sort of pale shadow or cliff note or sketch of something else, somewhere else.
Join us for the next Articulate Experience.
Articulate Experience is a production of the Articulate Foundation.
More at articulateshow.org
The program is produced by Tori Marchiony with help from Christine Walden, Mark Miller, Tom Contarino, Eva Roben, Matt Hoisch, Gabby Bing, Paula Butler, and Mary Morilla.
Our fact checker is Christopher Munden.
Original music and sound design by John Avarese.
I'm Jim Cotter.
