a long time ago there lived a giant a
selfish giant whose stunning garden was
the most beautiful in all the land
one evening this giant came home and
found all these children playing in his
garden he became enraged my own garden
is my own garden the giant said and he
built this high wall around it the
author Oscar while wrote the story of
The Selfish Giant in 1888 almost a
hundred years later
that giant moved into my Brooklyn
childhood and never left I was raised in
a religious family and I grew up reading
both the Bible and the Quran the hours
of reading both religious and
recreational far outnumber the hours of
television watching now on any given day
you could find my siblings and I curled
up in some part of our apartment reading
sometimes unhappily because on summer
days in New York City the fire hydrant
blasted and to our immense jealousy we
can hear our friends down there playing
in the gushing water their absolute joy
making its way up through our open
windows but I learned that the deeper I
went into my books the more time I took
with each sentence the less I heard the
noise of the outside world and so unlike
my siblings who were racing through
books I read slowly very very slowly I
was that child with her finger running
beneath the words until I was untaught
to do this told big kids don't use their
fingers in third grade we were made to
sit with our hands folded on our desk
unclasping them only to turn the pages
then returning them to that position our
teacher wasn't being cruel it was the
1970s and her goal was to get us reading
not just on grade level but far above it
and we were always being pushed to read
faster but in the quiet of my apartment
outside of my teachers gaze
I let my finger run beneath those words
and that selfish giant again told me his
story how he had felt betrayed by the
kids sneaking into his garden how he had
built this high wall and it did keep the
children out but a gray winter fell over
his garden and just stayed and stayed
with each rereading I learned something
new about the hard Stone's of the roads
that the kids were forced to play on
when they got expelled from the garden
about the gentleness of a small boy that
appeared one day and even about the
Giant himself maybe his words weren't
rageful after all maybe they were a plea
for empathy for understanding my own
garden is my own garden years later I
would learn of a writer named John
Gardner who referred to this is the
fictive dream or the dream of fiction
and I would realize that this was where
I was inside that book spending time
with the characters and the world that
the author had created and invited me
into as a child I knew that stories were
meant to be savored that stories wanted
to be slow and that some author had
spent months maybe years writing them
and my job is the reader especially as
the reader who wanted to one day become
a writer was to respect that narrative
long before there was cable or the
internet or even the telephone there are
people sharing ideas and information and
memory through story it's one of our
earliest forms of connective technology
it was the story of something better
down the Nile that sent the Egyptians
moving along it the story of a better
way to preserve the dead that brought
King Tut's remains into the 21st century
and more than two million years ago when
the first humans began making tools from
stone
someone must have said what if and
someone else remembered the story and
whether they told it through words or
gestures or drawings it was passed down
remembered hit a hammer and hear its
story the world is getting noisier
we've gone from boom boxes to Walkman to
portable CD players - iPods - any song
we want whenever we want it we've gone
from the four television channels of my
childhood to the seeming infinity of
cable and streaming as technology moves
us faster and faster through time and
space it seems to feel like stories
getting pushed out of the way I mean
literally pushed out of the narrative
but even as our engagement with stories
change are the trappings around it morph
from book to audio to Instagram to
snapchat we must remember our finger
beneath the words remember that story
regardless of the format has always
taken us to places we never thought we'd
go introduced us to people we never
thought we meet and shown us worlds that
we might have missed so while as
technology keeps moving faster and
faster I am good with something slower
my finger beneath the words has led me
to a life of writing books for people of
all ages books meant to be read slowly
to be savored my love for looking deeply
and closely at the world for putting my
whole self into it and by doing so
seeing the many many many possibilities
of a narrative turned out to be a gift
because taking my sweet time taught me
everything I needed to know about
writing and writing taught me everything
I needed to know about creating worlds
where people can be seen and heard where
their experiences could be legitimized
and where my story read or heard by
another person inspired something in
them that became a connection between us
a conversation and isn't that what this
is all about finding away at the end of
the day to not feel alone in this world
and a way to feel like we've changed it
before we leave stone to hammer man to
mummy
idea to story and all of it remember it
sometimes we read to understand the
future sometimes we read to understand
the past we read to get lost to forget
the hard times we're living in and we
read to remember
those who came before us who lived
through something harder
I write for those same reasons before
coming to Brooklyn my family lived in
Greenville South Carolina in a
segregated neighborhood called nickel
town all of us there were the
descendants of a people who had not been
allowed to learn to read or write
imagina the danger of understanding how
letters form words the danger of words
themselves the danger of illiterate
people and their stories but against
this backdrop of being threatened with
death for holding on to a narrative our
stories didn't die because there is yet
another story beneath that one and this
is how it has always worked for as long
as we've been communicating there's been
the layering to the narrative the story
is beneath the stories and the ones
beneath those this is how story has and
will continue to survive as I began to
connect the dots that connected the way
I learned to write and the way I learned
to read to an almost silenced people I
realized that my story was bigger and
older and deeper than I would ever be
and because of that it will continue
among these almost silenced people
they're ones there were the ones who
never learned to read they're
descendants now generations out of
enslavement if well off enough had gone
on to college grad school beyond some
like my grandmother and my siblings
seemed to be born reading as though
history stepped out of their way some
like my mother hitched on to the great
migration wagon which was not actually a
wagon and kissed the South goodbye but
here is the story within that story
those who left and those who stayed
carried with them the history of a
narrative knew deeply that writing it
down wasn't the only way they could hold
on to it knew they could sit on their
porches or their Stoops at the end of a
long day it's been a slow tale for their
children they knew they could sing their
store
through the thick heat of picking cotton
and harvesting tobacco knew they could
preach their stories I sold them into
quilts turn the most painful ones into
something laughable and through that
laughter exhale the history of a country
that tried again and again and again to
steal their bodies their spirit and
their story so as a child I learned to
imagine an invisible finger taking me
from words word from sentence to
sentence from ignorance to understanding
so as technology continues to speed
ahead I continued to read slowly knowing
that I am respecting the author's work
and the stories lasting power and I read
slowly to drown out the noise and
remember those who came before me who
probably the first people who finally
learned to control fire and circle
that's mute their new power a flame and
light and heat and I read slowly to
remember The Selfish Giant how he
finally tore that wall down and let the
children run free through his garden and
I read slowly to pay homage to my
ancestors who are not allowed to read at
all they too must have circled fires
speaking softly of their dreams their
hopes their futures each time we read
write or tell a story we step inside
their circle and it remains unbroken and
the power of story
lives on thank you
[Applause]