These are the words the editor Robert Linscott cabled to Truman Capote on reading early chapters from The Grass Harp, sent to Linscott from Italy where Truman was staying at the time. “There is a perfection about these two chapters that is simply miraculous.” One can imagine how lovely it was for Truman to hear these words while crafting his second novel, a follow up to Other Voices, Other Rooms, published to a good deal of acclaim for Linscott two years earlier.

Discovering, however, that his young author was planning to leave Italy and return to New York, Linscott cables, “Rumor has it that you plan to return . . . I hope this means with the completed manuscript, as it would be a pity to leave such ideal working conditions before the job is done.”

Linscott comes across as avuncular, perhaps, but his words carry an unspoken warning: Do not leave the place that is inspiring you!

His words came to mind today when strolling among all the beautiful houses here in Chatham, Mass., and imagining this or that addition or shed or tower as a perfect place to write a novel. While the work is progressing satisfactorily now, it’s not quite like what happened three years ago when I was here. In the summer of 2007, we rented a damp little house for two weeks; one of the first vacations of this length anywhere. Those of you who have stayed somewhere for longer than the usual week will know what changes seep into you when you are there long enough to feel yourself an inhabitant.

Looking back on that earlier stay, I recall two very important events in my writing life. I had been thinking of a story, a memoir-based novel about a car journey my family took when I was young. I knew at the time, however, and before writing a word, that my recollections of the trip were fragmentary and would not make a complete story. I would need to “fashion” other parts, to complement what I knew, buttress my memories with other parts of the narrative, and I wasn’t sure how this could be accomplished. So the story remained in the back of my mind, simmering until something would either deflate the power of the memories altogether, or electrify them into living words on paper. In either case, it was at the bottom of my working agenda.

Now, when I am on vacation, or even on business in another town, I visit the bookstores. I find them, measure the miles, obtain transportation, if necessary, and visit them. Not that I need any books I don’t have; Lord knows, most bookstore visits end with the sad feeling of knowing that my personal inventory is superior to the store’s. But because bookstores are like churches to me, I attend whenever and wherever I can.

So it happened that I was visiting Yellow Umbrella Books, one of two bookstores in Chatham (there used to be three, but that’s another story), and I picked up a copy of As I Lay Dying. I’d read a good deal of Faulkner, but not this short novel. When I read it in that damp house, I discovered, as countless writers have before me, the brilliance of its narrative technique. I was moved in a way I so seldom am (it actually happened again twice this year; more on that later). In a matter of days, my own novel appeared before me as a nighttime landscape under a flash of lightning.

And now I count the days before Lunch-Box Dream appears. It is, as you can imagine, a story told in multiple voices, as I am convinced some stories need to be told. I’m also rather convinced that being away from home, with its poor lawns, wilting plants, junk mail, dustballs, neighborhood shebangs, and recyclables, allowed my mind to explore, connect, tease out, and otherwise create — without the stultifying effects of the familiar — a new piece of fiction. A place was created in three dimensions, and my imagination inhabited it.

A second moment happened during those very same days. One morning, I was reading the newspaper in the backyard of the cottage, and a word popped out of the text and struck fire. A common word, but one I hadn’t thought of in any particular context. I mulled and mulled, then went to my computer and began to write another story I’d been thinking of. Now I have, not a lot, but perhaps forty pages of a novel that I am inching away on. Will it see publication? I hope someday it will, but it almost doesn’t matter. That single word showed the way this particular narrative would go. It was right and strong and perfect. It was no little joy to me to discover later that the word I had read was not in the newspaper at all. I had performed one of those common yet mysterious misreadings that we’re all prey to: rearranging the letters of a word to make another word, the mistake of which is then responsible for a flight of imagination you might never have experienced but for the error in reading.

Quite distinct from whatever novel might arise from the experience, I remember this moment of inspiration whenever my sullen mind tries to convince me that I’ll never come up with another idea. Ha, I say. I can’t always be brilliant, but I can always make mistakes.

So. Being away can indeed have a “simply miraculous” effect on your work. It almost encourages that kind of misreading where your mind is poised to leap at the slightest nudge. Retreats and colonies are designed to work the same way: take you the heck out of your common place, so that your mind can see what it could not see at home. To be completely random, I could say that The Wizard of Oz is more or less about the same thing.

From the beginning, I have wanted to use a poem by Langston Hughes as an epigraph in Lunch-Box Dream, and now that the book is nearing advance reading copies, I’ve had to get permission to reprint it. Discovering the whereabouts of Hughes’s estate (he died in 1967) was a little job in itself. The copyright designation in, for example, the Vintage paperback of Selected Poems of Langston Hughes, states: “Copyright renewed 1987 by George Houston Bass, Surviving Executor of the Estate of Langston Hughes, Deceased”. So, I knew we were already two people away from the writer. But a simple question: “Who is the current estate holder?” elicited a short train of pointed fingers. Googling the obvious did not lend useful information. The reference librarian at my local library pointed me to the curator of the Hughes Papers at Yale; she, in turn, directed me to Harold Ober Associates, whose spot-on receptionist sent me to the voice mail of Craig Tenney, who appears to handle the estate. In an email, Mr. Tenney informed me that the estate is actually governed by two parties, Harold Ober Associates and Random House. Random holds the copyright domestically, while Ober handles international and certain subsidiary rights.

At Tenney’s urging, I faxed both Ober and RH’s permissions department the request. Some time later, I received a contract from RH, spelling out the fee, the license, and other points to be followed in printing the work. I was then to follow up with Ober to gain the other rights, and I’d be all set. Except . . .

Except that the agreement’s citation to the poem, and its bibliographic credit, were to a different version of the poem than the one I wanted and had asked for. Hughes tinkered with the wording of his poems. The poem I wanted is called “Lunch in a Jim Crow Car” and appears in the 1959 volume, Selected Poems, which was very much overseen by Hughes himself. In Collected Poems, however, published in 1994 under the editorship of Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel, twenty-seven years after Hughes’s death, there is a different and, to my mind, slightly inferior version, which was picked up from Hughes’s final book, The Panther and the Lash. Since the wording of the RH agreement stipulated that no changes could be made to Hughes’s text, the agreement as written wouldn’t actually work for me. I argued for the primacy of the Selected version, and received that. The credit is being reworked, so all is dandy.

But the story doesn’t end there; not for me, at least. I went to Rampersad’s biography of Hughes, where he describes the occasion of the writing of the poem. In 1953, Hughes was traveling by train across Louisiana, in the Jim Crow car, and watched an elderly woman eat her lunch there. Rampersad describes how Hughes wrote the poem on the spot and cites in his text the version as it appears in Collected. Besides wondering how a biographer could know the circumstances of the writing of a text, I felt this could only be an oversight, for the version appearing earlier in Selected was rougher and, seemingly, the original.

It preyed on my mind. Rampersad is fastidious, a first-rate biographer and scholar, but I could not let go the feeling that I might be right about the poem. Could some sort of answer be found in the manuscripts of the poem? I emailed the Beinecke Library at Yale, the reliquary of the Hughes papers, for permission to consult the manuscript. Yes, fine. Prior to coming, I consulted the online guide to the holdings, which are part of the James Weldon Johnson collection, and jotted down the Call number, Box number, and Folder number of the materials relating to “Lunch in a Jim Crow Car.”

We get a bit breathless now. The Beinecke is door to door a half-hour from my house. I drove up this past Friday, requested Box 380, and a few minutes later was holding Hughes’s manuscripts, typescripts, carbons, and revisions in my hands.

Opening up the folded paper holding the first items, I found three sheets of lined paper ripped from a small spiral notebook that measured some 2.5” x 4”, with the spiral on the short side. The pencil script ran lengthwise down the page.

After the last line of the poem (which I will not reproduce here) is the notation, “aragonaut, just / before New Iberia, / June 16, 1953.” A little below that, in ink, “1st draft / Langston Hughes.

Anyone who has touched original holographic material will know the profound feeling of touching history when you hold such a page. Beyond that, my heart skipped when I realized that it was on those three ripped-off notebook pages that Hughes actually wrote the poem, in that train car, looking at that woman eating a sandwich. These pages were like dispatches from a war —and it was a war. It was not a great battle, but a small and striking moment. And Hughes was bringing his mind, his heart, and talent to bear witness to it.

But here’s the thing. The poem as he jotted it down in that rattling train car was in nearly every respect the Collected version. So where did the Selected version come from? The answer is partly to be found in the other items in the folder.

Inside the second folded sheet is an original typescript of the pencil holograph. It bears a title now, “Jim Crow Car.” Below it, a more extended legend: “Written in the Jim Crow / car of the Argonaut, / Southern Pacific train, / near New Iberia, La., / June 16, 1953. This / second draft, New York, / June 30, 1953. See / DEFENDER column for story.”

Following that is the carbon of the above, with a penciled notation: “Poem sent / to Davis / 10-15-56 . . . ”

The next item is another typescript with no changes to the poem as it has existed so far.

In the next item, however, things begin to happen. Above the title, “JIM CROW CAR” Hughes has penciled in “Lunch Time In A ” with a penciled bracket to the left of both lines and the notation, “1 line,” indicating that the title is to read in a single line as “Lunch Time In A Jim Crow Car.

The text of the poem shows penciled revisions, too, beginning to bring the wording in line with the Selected version. Punctuation at the ends of two lines is either crossed out or added, and two commas in the final line are changed to dashes.

The second to last item, a typescript incorporating the full title and the penciled changes in the above version, now contains the additional revisions in pencil — the deletion of one word, and the substitution of another — that bring the text into line with the poem published in Selected.

The final document is a fair typed copy of this poem, now bearing the trimmer title, “Lunch in a Jim Crow Car.”

To me, this last item shows Hughes revising the wording to become, in fact, more jagged than the more easily scanned original, a bit more problematic, but powerful in a new way and, oddly perhaps, more immediate. The poem has only four lines; in the original 1953 train-car manuscript, lines two, three, and four all begin with the word “And.” In the revision that stack is eliminated and the ease of reading and speaking it is disrupted, to bring it more fully, I think, in keeping with its explosive subject matter and the image of the bomb that is central to the poem. Its roughness, if you will, makes readers pay closer attention to what is being said. I like it better.

So, what is the answer to the two versions? My feeling is that Hughes liked his 1953 original up through at least October 1956, but that sometime after that and before he organized his Selected Poems in 1959, he revised it into the final version seen in the Papers. Perhaps he thought the text too soft because the progress of civil rights was too slow, and it made him mad.

After 1959? I’m not exactly certain (I would be more certain, but Rampersad’s biography is at home and I’m not), but since Hughes died the year of his last volume, The Panther and the Lash, in which the poem has reverted to its original form, he may not have been well enough or even alive to see it through. If he was, he may have decided to go backward. If he wasn’t, the texts in that final book may have been chosen or partly chosen by an editor who made the decision to negate Hughes’s 1956-1959 tinkering.

A heady experience, examining primary documents. Since Hughes apparently wrote about the incident that incited the poem in a column for the Chicago Defender, I may find my way back to the Beinecke to see if I can shed further light on the subject. Anything to touch his manuscripts again.

After a week filled to the gills with the sketching out of one book, the second revision of another, the last gasps of a third, and the first tremblings of a fourth, I’ve got, as they say, nothin’.

Except this little nugget from a pleasant little book I picked up by John Malcolm Brinnin about his friend Truman; this here bit from 1948; will let TC have the last word:

“How was Haiti?” I asked as we were shown to the table he’d reserved.

“Almost died,” he said. “Some kind of jungle fever so baffling it scared the doctors. And I don’t mean the witch doctors. I couldn’t tell if the drums and chants I heard were up in the hills somewhere or in my head. I’d ask the nurses but they’d never say because they never understood what I was talking about. Then I convinced myself they weren’t nurses at all, simply some quiet girls who’d been told to stay with me until I’d closed my eyes for the last time. . . . ”

Having just returned from Rochester, that island of lovely lawns in the thumb knuckle of Michigan (as described by natives), I’m beginning to “unpack” the mind — stuffed from a week of school visits, lunches, dinners, a banquet, and thousand-book signings, all hosted by the town’s extraordinary Authors in April program, a feat of organization made possible by hundreds of volunteers, a fleet of cars, a bizarre delivery truck, a slobbering St. Bernard, a pen-protector’s worth of Sharpies, multiple participating restaurants, and over ten thousand students from Kindergarten to 8th grade. Whew!

It was Anne and Robin, hilarious co-drivers on Thursday, who provided one of the most memorable moments, when they pulled away from the AiA parking slot (at, I think, Meadow Brook Elementary) so handily outlined by those orange rubber cones, by trying to pull one with us.

“What’s that sound?”
“Oh, we didn’t?”
“Oh, yeah, we did.”

So, leaving Anne laughing at the wheel, Robin and I hopped out to restore order to the parking slot for the next author.

Good times.

Meanwhile, we’re still unpacking here, chuckling over the memories.

O, the beckoning road! Day Two of our journey dawned and ended in sunlight, as we packed up, set our sights south, and drove out of Cleveland. Eventually.

There was a bit of trouble finding the exact route out of the city, as the Triptik didn’t start exactly from the old house in South Euclid. We zigged and zagged for a bit before finding Warrensville Center Road, then crawled along until we were out, passing lots of “City of . . . ” signs along the way before reaching what you’d call the Cleveland limits. Then south.

Farmlands. The scene was repeated hundreds of times: a house on a rise over the old road, outbuildings, silos, fences, and open scrubby fields. rolling and stretching away for acres.

Our first real stop was in the lovely Mt. Gilead, and you’ll know why when you read the book. After that it was to Delaware (our original first night’s stop, but not this time), for a (late) lunch at Bun’s restaurant with Floyd and Stella Dickman and Tami Furlong, whose gem of a children’s only bookstore, Fundamentals, is right across the street. Signed some books. If you’re anywhere in mid-Ohio, you already know what we discovered yesterday: that Fundamentals is a must for anyone interested in children’s literature. Tami also stocks toys there, which we hear children also like.

After lunch we went off the old route for a personal homage. Since Delaware is only a half hour from north Columbus, we had to stop. You know where.

O, the beckoning Thurber!

The James Thurber’s house sits on the greatest little square there. The house wasn’t open, but the door unlocked, and when we pulled it open we found the staff in a meeting in one of the rooms. “I’m sorry, we’re closed.” Time to be a little forward. Explained that we came from forever and were only passing through and since the Thurber house has a pretty awesome Children’s Writer in Residence program, we just wanted to introduce ourselves. Pat Shannon scuttled away for a moment and came back to say that we could walk around for a few minutes. O! And also O! Into the rooms, up the narrow stairs. His room! The door to grandpa’s attic. Where the bed fell!

Lisa Yee, you know what I’m talking about!

South again, thinking to end the evening in Ripley on the border. Didn’t last that long. Got to Hillsboro. And into Kentucky!

Day One of the trip started with an early rising to get to LaGuardia for an 8:40 flight. Without a hitch, even driving in the remaining drizzle from our latest rainstorm. Arrived a bit early in Cleveland, that mecca by the lake, picked up rental car. First stop: my old house, which I haven’t seen since 1961.

It turns out to have been altered superficially from my long-ago time in it, some owners having closed in the carport and changed the window arrangement on the front. More on emotional upheavals at a later time and place. From there, straight to Joseph-Beth Booksellers, whom we had previously contacted to say wouldn’t it be nice if we stopped in. They agreed. Signed some books. Met Katie, Children’s manager. Cool.

On the second day, we planned to drive south toward Delaware and our first little stop, this time, fifty-one years later, to lunch with our friend Floyd Dickman, and stop in at Fundamentals, a bookstore right across the street from Bun’s restaurant.

More to come.

. . . was an unfamiliar term until Thursday evening when I was honored to speak to a group of them. For over thirty years, the School of Education at the University of Connecticut (known as the Neag School) has paired its student teachers with cooperating teachers — seasoned professionals in elementary, middle, and high schools in the towns around UConn, to create a continuum of learning and support that, as was plain on Thursday, benefits both the veterans and recruits in equal measure. It’s an outstanding program with a long history and, we hope, a longer future.

We talked about stories (of course), inspiration, Pico Della Mirandola, Kafka, and the combined responsibility of teachers and children’s writers to shed some light for our children in the dark world. Yes, the dark world. It’s not a very nice place out there right now, reminding us of all sorts of maudlin but nevertheless very possibly accurate Wordsworthian claims of the angelic primacy of childhood. But then you look into the faces, young and old, of that audience at Rose Commons, and you cannot help but see the bright side. So many college seniors on the verge of making this a better place. We can hope, after all.

The event was sponsored by the Neag School, their program Teachers for a New Era, which rings with hope and vitality, and Phi Lambda Theta, a fraternity with a special focus on education. Thank you, Neag, TNE, and all, for a lovely evening among the good.

The bear in the pit is stupid for freedom,
rushing against your linked hands.

If you trap him there the game is stopped.
If he breaks the pit the game is stopped.
If he goes too far the game is stopped.

You take him by the hands, you love him up good.
He says he was a good idea gone bad,
a must-do inspiration that fizzled out,
and he recants his preposterous bearness.

You dance a little. The game starts up.
Now you’re the bear.

The short version is: I won the Edgar.

The longer version is that each year the Mystery Writers of America award their stylish and weighty statuette of Edgar A. Poe to the best mystery of the year in a slew of categories: best novel, best first novel, best short story, best original paperback, best Young Adult, play, teleplay, film screenplay, etc. My book, The Postcard (2008, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers), won the Juvenile award. Alvina Ling, my indefatigable editor, and Ames O’Neill, L,B’s publicist, were there, along with my soldier of an agent, George Nicholson, and, of course, my wife, Dolores. Also in attendance: Michael Connelly, Sue Grafton, James Lee Burke, Harlan Coben, Lee Child (current President of MWA), and lots of other names from the top tier of mystery writing.

Descending from our room (yes, we decided to stay overnight at New York’s Grand Hyatt, which the MWA took over the assorted ballrooms of), the first bloke we see is John Green; the first blokess, Julie Strauss-Gabel, his editor. I’m happy to report that John won the YA Edgar for Paper Towns. Congratulations to them both!

Sadly, my co-nominee, friend, teacher, and inspiration, Patricia Reilly Giff, was unable to attend at the last minute, but I was rooting for her. Still, I feel as if a good part of my win is hers, too. I wouldn’t have been anywhere near that podium if not for Pat.

Still floating, though the unkempt mass of work on the desk is a power greater than gravity.

But, yes. The week that was.

I can’t say enough about the beautiful people at the Daves Avenue Elementary School in Los Gatos, Calif., who hosted an inspiring visit this week. It was Author’s Day at the elementary school, and I was privileged to chat with the sparkling second and third graders — Droonlings, many of them — while Sid Fleischman engaged the upper graders and Matthew Gollub the littler ones.

After a sunny, dry, seventy-degree day of presentations and signing and communal lunch (with lots of students selected as some of the school’s best writers — who blithely thought they were the lucky ones!), the three writers adjourned to Lisa Mammel’s quaint old-town house where at the longest dining table this side of San Simeon we supped with Lisa, her husband (and chef) Chris, their charming children Enza and Cole, Susan von Felten, the school’s principal, Amy Goldsmith, librarian, Billy Martin, 5th grade teacher, and another couple of folks who I’m ashamed to say I can’t recall the names of, though I can remember their twinkling talk.

There was some serious discussion around literacy and words, creative arts, education, and the paths people take, willingly and un, to get where they are. I had the odd sensation of being reminded of something I’ve never quite experienced before, a smart, bohemian-ish gathering of folks of all ages engaged at a long lively table in good talk. Must do this more. . . .

It was a CT to CA round trip of some 36 hours and far too short a stay.

Los Gatos (“the cats”) is fifteen minutes southwest of the San Jose airport, and squarely in Silicon Valley. If I had known — as I later discovered — that John Steinbeck and his wife lived there on Greenwood Avenue where he wrote a fair part of The Grapes of Wrath I might have been persuaded to stay longer; say, move in. One of the places I might have moved into was the Mammels’ gem of a house. Barring that, I would have taken any one of the bungalows on the northeast side of Broadway, adjacent to the Toll House Hotel where the authors were put up and where, yes, there was a cookie on the pillow at bedtime. Breakfasted in Le Boulanger on the corner of the nearby plaza. Heavenly. Coffee. Banana Nut muffin. Didn’t have my notebook, but the hotel’s telephone notepad which worked just as well. Read the complimentary WSJ from which this, from an article about Murray Perahia’s new edition of Beethoven’s 32 sonatas for the German publisher Henle:

“It’s not just a scholastic activity. I studied the sketches. It’s a great privilege to study the way Beethoven thought, and the sketches give you an insight. He thought in very long stretches. All four movements of the ‘Funeral March’ Sonata, for example, were an inspiration that came at one moment. But I think in all the sonatas he saw the whole picture. It’s the same with Mozart, music came in a flash — though it took longer in Beethoven’s case, and it was harder to get that flash worked out.”

A fascinating look at musical creation, and I’m once again startled by the similarities with literary creation. They both, after all, happen by scratching a wet tool on paper.

And now back east to dream of long warm green summer days and to get that flash worked out.