It’s October–my mom’s birth month! And I have a new book out! So this blog post is dedicated to her, my first patron of the arts.

Some of the best writers in history had patrons–Chretien de Troyes, Shakespeare, Jane Austen. Check out the acknowledgments page of many modern literary novels, and you’re likely to see thanks to foundations and funds. Because let’s face it, making art is not always synonymous with making money. From the moment inspiration strikes, a writer needs to find someone who believes in her utterly, someone who will support her not just materially but morally.

My mom was a girl of the early sixties, in pedal pushers and Keds and a middy blouse. She wore red lipstick and a kerchief, and she smoked Parliament cigarettes. In college, she dreamed of becoming a meteorologist, although her very traditional parents didn’t love the idea. Did this make her determined to nurture her own children’s dreams? Maybe so, because she was my first writing teacher. As a toddler, I used to scribble drawings on church collection envelopes and bank deposit slips, and Mom would write the words I dictated. These stories all seemed to be about a child up a tree, with scary things coming after her. To this day, that’s pretty much what all my books are about. A girl in trouble. Big trouble.

When I was six years old, I came down with pneumonia in the dead of winter. We lived in western New York State in a town that looks suspiciously like Avalon, the setting of the Lakeshore Chronicles books. This area is a repository of the worst lake-effect snows in the country, and due to the pneumonia, I was not allowed to go outside. My mother no doubt tired of endless readings of The Poky Little Puppy, Go Dog. Go!, Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and Yertle the Turtle. She showed me how to knit and taught me to play selections from The Cat in the Hat Songbook on piano. Finally, she taught me to type.

We had an old manual typewriter with ribbon that smelled of musty ink, and an inspiring complement of round glass keys. It was an antique even back then, and it had a curious, irresistible charm. The typeface was an odd sans serif lettering I later learned was called “Futura.” From the moment I sat down in front of this typewriter, feet dangling from my chair, eyes wide with wonder, I was overcome by the feeling that magic was about to happen.

Mom and I sat side-by-side at the Formica kitchen table. It was yellow, with a pattern of overlapping boomerangs, and I had to sit on a stack of Grolier encyclopedias to reach the keyboard with the proper posture. My mother was very methodical in showing me her method of touch-typing. She started with the four fingers of the left hand: ASDF. Again and again I typed those letters in various combinations: FADS. SAD. AS. AD. FA, until I could type them with my eyes closed. We moved on to the right hand. We added one letter at a time until I’d memorized the location of ever letter on the keyboard. She showed me the shift key and how it could transform a keystroke into something entirely different. She gave me a tour of the exotic symbols above the numerals, taught me the meaning of the mystical ampersand.

I recovered from the pneumonia before I learned to touch-type the top row of numbers and symbols, and to this day, I’m not able to use them without looking. But the lessons of those dark winter days became part of my blood and bone. Something in me awakened–a realization that publishing is the way a story finds its voice. Magic did happen. My stories were transformed into printed pages. To an emerging writer, this is the moment the world shifts.

It’s doubtful that when my mother sat down with a bored, restless, feverish child, she meant to foster a future writer. She was probably just trying to minimize the whining and earn some peace and quiet.

But it was also her instinct, and her mothering style, to nurture creativity in a variety of fashions. When we were very small, my sister and I used to lie awake in the bedroom we shared and shout downstairs to our mother to play the piano for us. Invariably–and, I now realize, with remarkable good humor–she would oblige, playing and singing us to sleep on our old upright piano, the strains of Brahm’s Lullabye and “Here We Go Looby Loo” winding up the stairs and into the darkening bedroom with its gabled windows and angled shadows lying across the wooden floor.

My mother believes in art in all its forms, but music was the thing that came most naturally to her. She believes in singing several times a day, with gusto and confidence. She gives the same value to “Little Brown Jug” as she does to an aria from “Cosi von Tutti.”

She taught all her kids that the most important thing a mother can do for her child is to be her soft place to fall, the place where her creativity can bloom and her spirit can soar. So much of the advice she gave me growing up is directly applicable to a writing career. To wit:

• Say what you mean and mean what you say.
• This too shall pass.
• You know more than you think you know.
• Don’t let the world tell you no.
• Keep things that matter, and fix them when they need repairs. This applies to old family heirlooms, your grade point average and your relationships, especially your marriage.
• When someone says an unkind word to you, treat it like a fart in church–hold your breath for thirty seconds, until the smell goes away. Then carry on.
• Be with people who make you happy.
• Use common sense.
• Don’t ever finance something that will lose value with time. If you don’t have enough money to buy a car without financing, then take the bus.
• Least said soonest mended.
• To thine own self be true.

These days, Mom is still my number one fan. She unapologetically (and deservedly) trots me out to meet her garden club, her bridge club, the library committee and the people at the dog park. And I always oblige with a smile on my face. Thanks, Mom.

This year for her birthday, she’s getting a spa day and her very own copy of my latest, Lakeshore Christmas.

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