Jen Byrant: William Carlos Williams and HisMuse

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Jennifer M. Brown, Curriculum Connections -- School Library Journal, 11/04/2008

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A River of Words (Bryant)
© 2008 by Melissa Sweet

Jen Bryant has written 15 books, many of them biographies. Like the subject of her latest picture book tribute, A River of Words: The Story of William Carlos Williams (Eerdmans, 2008), illustrated by Melissa Sweet, Bryant grew up in a small town in New Jersey and spent a lot of time outdoors–riding horses, taking long walks, and cycling about on her bike. She now lives in Chester County, PA, and shares with Williams the notion of the river as a muse. Here Bryant explores the guiding influences of childhood (both her own and her subject’s) and discusses the importance of taking time to experience the world around us, and the ways in which sensory experiences can translate into poetry.

Why biography?
My father was an undertaker, [and I suppose I was] starting with biography when I was typing the obituaries, people’s lives in brief. In each there was a beginning, a middle, and an end, and also…a who was leftover. The guy who worked in the local gas station fought in a war or survived polio, or, as a boy, went on a voyage to Australia. And I’d think, “Holy cow, that guy pumped gas! I didn’t know all that.” Ordinary people do extraordinary things.

What drew you to Williams?
William Carlos Williams has been in the fore and back of my mind since I was a kid because I grew up in New Jersey, and because his work is accessible to kids. Somewhere along the way, I remember seeing his poems in the library. What was interesting to me was that Williams was trying to balance and to create [an integrated] life out of his two careers–poetry and medicine.

In such a brief biography, how did you decide what to include and what to leave out?
When I started writing, I was writing biography because I loved research. Five or six years into that, I started to crave a bit more creative freedom, so I started reading and writing poetry. My first picture book, Georgia’s Bones (Eerdmans, 2005) was a poem [about the painter Georgia O’Keefe]. Eileen Spinelli, Jerry’s wife, told me, “You need a beginning and an ending here, and you can send this in as a picture book text.”

[In biography, as with a poem,] I try to focus on one or two images, one or

A River of Words (Bryant)
© 2008 by Melissa Sweet

two nuggets in the person’s life. Georgia O’Keefe had a huge life. In that book, I focused on her insistence on her vision; she literally saw things in a different way than other people did. And then her love of bones, which she saw as beautiful, and [which] other people saw as leftover and ugly. Hopefully those things work well enough that the bigger themes come across. For William Carlos Williams, it’s the power of observation, the struggle to balance [his] two careers, and the importance of the Passaic River in his life. They had to carry the story.

You begin by emphasizing “Willie’s” time alone in the “many wild places” in Rutherford, NJ. Do you believe it’s important to have that kind of unstructured time to play and imagine?
It’s so necessary, especially today, to have that physical connection [to the world] and the freedom to explore it. East Rutherford is very different today than it was during Williams’s time. Today kids are constantly observed and shuttled here and there. You can’t play if someone is always telling you what to do.

The basic tool of art, whether you’re a dancer, a writer, or a painter, is your body. If the experience is not in your body, it’s not going to be a unique work. I don’t separate mind and body really. There are certain triggers for your memory, and they come through your five senses. I rode horses all my life [and that] factored into [my first novel] Pieces of Georgia (Knopf, 2007).

There are some fun details in the drawings that don’t appear in the text, such as the placard identifying Willie’s school as The Horace Mann School. Did you and Melissa Sweet coordinate efforts?
I provide [the artist] with a list of my major resources. I sent Melissa some [photocopies], archival photograph references, a video. She then went down and visited the area [where Williams grew up]. Both of us did an awful lot of work that never gets into the book in terms of specific words or images, but it informs the book.

Whose idea was the triple time line that connects Williams’s publications, his life, and world events?
[A chronology] is standard in a biography, but this is much better than anything I might have suggested. That was Shannon White’s idea, my editor, and I imagine that was a collaborative effort between her and Gail Brown, the art director/designer. They dated the poems I suggested, [included] world events, and they asked me for the time line of [Williams’s] life–again, these people have big lives, but [the chronology] hits a lot of high points and his major publications.

Melissa and I felt that Williams really believed that everything was connected. So when you read a poem about him looking at sparrows on a street or a plum in the refrigerator, [you view] things differently. Williams seemed to say through his entire body of work–even with his plays and reviews–that nothing is insignificant. He really, really believed that.