A few days ago, having put two new stories on Kindle, I thought how different they were in length and plot, and yet in spirit or atmosphere, they weren't that far apart. In one very short story, Gusty's Christmas, the main character is a little wind who gets carried by his older sister to a place where the trees (even those trees made into houses or boats) sing Christmas carols. For the first time in his life, the active little wind (about six or seven years old, although his age is never stated) calms down enough to enjoy listening to music, begins to day-dream and from that mood slips easily into sleep. Very appropriate for a bedtime story.
In the other, much longer tale, How Hans Christian Andersen Got Famous, one of the characters is also a wind, but he's overshadowed by his playmate, a young boy who meets Mr. Andersen and decides to tell him every odd story he hears about in the hopes that the story-teller will make a fairy tale out of it. As I was finishing up, I realized that in many ways that young boy is very much like me when I was his age (also never stated but about 10 or 12). I never knew any authors, but I lived in the library where all the novels and biographies came dazzlingly alive for me. The children's room was up a long, long staircase, which always seemed like the path to a wonderland. I never put it in those words, of course, but I was aware of a deep excitement every time I climbed it, an eagerness to get to a magic kingdom.
When I wasn't in the library and was visiting friends, I used to try to get my friends' mothers to talk to me about their lives. I wanted the stories of their childhoods, and if they came from another country, I would feel the aura of that foreign land around them. I wanted my grandmother and my great-uncle to tell me about their lives growing up and especially, more than anything, exactly where in Europe their parents came from. They never knew! They never cared! I could hardly believe it.
I had fallen in love with Europe. I had also fallen in love with the past. And I'm sure all that came from the books I read, the church I went to, which was designed after a medieval French church, and the nearby Cloisters, that was a world in itself of beauty and antiquity.
One of the historical novels I loved the most as a child -- and still love -- was Mary Mapes Dodge's Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates. She put so much of Holland into it that reading it was like being there. I didn't know until a few years ago that she had never been there, that she had gotten the information from her neighbors. Reading it was a total immersion into another culture that was friendly and completely different at the same time.
About ten years ago, I came across Ouida's A Dog of Flanders and The Nuremberg Stove, both of which had me completely enchanted from the opening sentence. All I have to do is open a page in either story and I'm engulfed by the poetry and pathos of her world.
In the stories I've written about Denmark I would like the same thing to happen to my readers, that they'll be drawn into an atmosphere that has a lot of tenderness in it, that they'll feel a close connection to the characters and their families, that they'll learn a little something about a different country, and that they'll end the story feeling they've had not only a good read but a good time.
