Be Book Wise: A Book Without an Ending

Posted on August 15th, 2007 by Leisa
Filed under: Authors, Be Book Wise

“A good book has no ending.”
~R.D. Cumming

A good book has no ending because it is either a catalyst for change, an inspiration for life, or a starting point in a journey. I remember just a couple of things about my life is sixth grade. One was the daily writing assignments our teacher gave us. She said we could write on any topic we wanted. While most children wrote about something different every day, I chose to write a book. As a 12 year old child I was inspired by the book Stuart Little by E. B. White and The Borrowers by Mary Norton. They became the inspiration for my book. I wrote a book about children who had lost their parents, but whom were roughly the same size of Stuart Little.

Day in and day out I wrote of their adventures. They traveled the world and what I knew of the world thus far was pretty much taken from books. So those books were again without ending because they became the backdrop for my understanding of the world. They became the inspiration for one chapter after another. The books I read were truly without ending because they inspired a new chapter, in a new writers life.

By the time I was done I had written many chapters and proudly handed them in to my teacher. I couldn’t wait to take them home to show my parents, but first they had to be graded. The last day of school the teacher handed back everyones work. I waited anxiously. But my name was never called. My book wasn’t among the work returned that day. When I asked about it she said she must have left it at home, but not worry she would mail it to me. My precious book never arrived.

Several years later we learned from a friend of the teacher that she had aspirations to write a book about children’s literature. Not the literature written for children, but a book about literature written by children. We learned that she had a habit of keeping some of her student’s favorite work as research for her book.

How I wish I had that book today. What fun it would be to read it to my sixth grade girl. She could get a glimpse into the child I was back then. She could learn from my writings about how I saw the world and about the adventures I dreamed of perhaps having some day.

As far as I know that teacher hasn’t written her book. For one child, that book did have a fateful end.

~ Leisa L. Watkins