Author Says Reading Fiction Is Rehearsal for Life

Where do dreams come from? How do memories, some of them long-forgotten, come back to us while we're sleeping?

Lois Lowry imagines it this way: While we sleep, tiny, ethereal beings move about our homes and touch the objects that surround us. From our belongings, they gather bits of memories - the blue of the sky on a perfect day at the beach, a game of fetch with a childhood dog - and weave those memories together into dreams. Then, softly, careful not to wake us, they breathe these dreams into our sleeping heads, filling each night with memories that comfort and restore us.

Lowry, 69, has turned this enchanting idea into a book for children: "Gossamer," which pits these tiny, benevolent dream-givers against nightmares and the harshness of real life. It will be in bookstores next week.

For nearly 30 years - and in more than 30 books - Lowry has been a bit like those dream-bestowers: She's been examining all that's around her and weaving what she sees - and some of her own memories - into new, rich, imaginary worlds. And those worlds give her young readers some of the tools they need in their own lives.

She loves talking to groups of children, she says, because it's like being surrounded by a crowd of best friends.

"The kids haven't met me before I come, but they know me through the books," she says. "You're not ever in a hostile audience. Kids relate so closely to books."

That fact, combined with the idea that books "matter," is what has driven Lowry since she started writing books in 1977. She was 40 then, and her own children were no longer young, but it never occurred to Lowry to write for anyone but children. It is, perhaps, because she remembers her own childhood so clearly - what it felt like to be small and young, how mysterious the world was then.

"I think some people remember those years in a more objective way, like it's a film being shown," Lowry says. "For me, it's always slipping back into that childhood body and remembering those childhood feelings."

Her gift for remembering - and her gift for writing books that kids connect with - has been earning her acclaim and awards since her first book, "A Summer to Die," a fictional story based on the death of her own sister, was published. She's won the Newbery Medal, which is considered the most prestigious award in children's literature, twice.

In her most famous novel, "The Giver," which won her the second of those two Newbery Medals in 2004, she created a utopia, where life is free of pain and war and struggle. But it's also free of choices, free of love, free of the things that make life matter - and a 12-year-old boy has to decide whether a world of standardized perfection should be given up for a flawed world full of color, pain and passion.

This sort of thing makes for rich reading. It also gives kids some heavy things to think about - things they might not have thought about before. And that, perhaps, is why Lowry's books have been banned or challenged over the years by parents concerned about "disturbing themes." The American Library Association listed her as one of the 10 most frequently challenged authors in 2005, a list she's been appearing on for years.

The idea that kids need protection from her books bothers Lowry.

"I consider it very troubling," she says. "I guess it does say that I write to serious and provocative issues. But I'm somebody who cares a great deal about children and their sensitivities. I would never write anything in a million years that would be damaging to children."

Even though "Gossamer," Lowry's latest book, is a story about creatures that bestow pleasant dreams, readers aren't protected from unhappy realities. When a young boy who's been abused by his father and separated from his mother comes to live with an older woman who agrees to foster him, his traumatic past comes into full view.

"I think reading fiction is the way we rehearse our own lives and prepare ourselves for things we are going to encounter," Lowry says. Children should read about loss and pain and sorrow, she says, because kids are going to encounter scary and disturbing things at some point.

"I think that reading fiction," she says, "in a comfortable chair with a mom in the next room, is not a bad way."

Lowry's name and books are familiar to anyone who has followed children's literature for the last three decades. But she may gain a wider audience soon. This summer, she plans to work with a theater director on the West Coast to adapt "Gossamer" for the stage."" And "The Giver" is now being made into a movie that's scheduled to hit theaters sometime next year. Jeff Bridges is in talks to star, and the screenplay - by Vadim Perelman, who'll also direct - is being tweaked this spring, she says.

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(c) 2006, Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.