The first story I remember writing was about a child who had fallen off a stagecoach as it rattled over a western plain. I had never seen a stagecoach, or a western plain. The story only suggested itself to me because my father had mentioned a movie based on the premise of that unfortunate child. I remember wrestling with the problem of how to bounce a kid off, or out of, a stagecoach, and then wrestling with the problem of what to do with someone nine or ten years old now standing alone in the western weeds and watching a stagecoach careen out of sight.
I don’t remember how I solved either of those problems but whatever approach I took resulted in a story good enough to be read to my fourth-grade classmates at Holy Name School in Ketchikan, Alaska. Our teacher was a nun whom even I knew—with my three-and-a-half years of education—to be wizened. She had chosen the name Sister Francis de Sales when she’d made her vows. It was Sister Francis de Sales who deemed my story good enough. She allowed me to read it in front of the class, which was actually a class of third and fourth graders. Holy Name spread each of its four teachers over two grades. Even doubled up, there were probably only ten or twelve pupils per teacher. My dozen or so listened politely, but that’s all I remember about my introduction to literary glory. I draw a blank on whether or not they applauded, and a blank on whether any of them asked questions.
Still, I have remained, for decades, grateful to Sister Frances de Sales for giving me the opportunity to take the mess my imagination had served up and place it before an apparently attentive audience. I think all of my work since then has been an effort to improve on that fourth-grade performance. Stories, plays, songs, musical comedies, and rhyming picture books have been piled on that stagecoach story till the heap of them stands shoulder high. It would be a daunting task to try to dig out the bounced boy from underneath that pile, but someday I’m going to have to give it a try. Not because the stagecoach story offers any clues about the craft I’ve followed for a good part of my life. What it offers is two good questions: (1) How do you bounce a kid off a stagecoach? And, (2) once he’s dusted himself off and the stagecoach is disappearing, what do you do with him?
