Grocery Transfiguration, a guest post by Polly Horvath

I know less now than when I was younger.  I also think everyone else knows less than I used to assume they did.  One of the benefits of age is that you have seen yourself and other people change ideas about what is so many times over, which hasn’t made any of those ideas wrong.  Instead like the birds we see migrating now in the fall, they are lovely to look at as they pass over.  And then they are gone, leaving something else to look at instead.  So, when I do a short piece like this, I take my own thoughts with a grain of salt.

When I was growing up my brother and sister and I didn’t have a lot of toys.  So, we made do.  My favorite place to play was on the kitchen counter with the groceries.  They were far better for my purpose than dolls which were too specific in form.  A can of beans could be part of a castle, a young girl, a dog – you get the idea.  I would create endless stories.  Stories came to an abrupt end when my mother started to make dinner.  A saving grace of which I’m still envious even though characters were sometimes sacrificed for sustenance, making sequels impossible and whole towns sometimes disappeared down my family’s greedy gullet.  Armageddon.  Oh, the humanity! Still, I often thought, when struggling with a book ending, how nice it would be if someone would just come into my office and say, “Get lost, I have to make dinner,” and I could fold up my tent and go home.  Home being realityland or what passes for it around here.

When I could finally print, I transferred these grocery games to the page.  The process was exactly the same.  I saw stories unspooling in front of me and instead of moving around boxes of Jell-o, I put words to paper.  But I miss, I admit, sometimes, the delight of transmogrifying the loveliness of a jar of jam into the nemesis next door.  

When I sat down to write a new book a while ago, I found myself looking longingly at our kitchen counter.  I hadn’t an idea in my head but since writing is essentially your brain cells at play, I got down four boxes of Jell-o and they suddenly became the four McCready sisters.  Each a different flavor but all in the general Jell-o family. The children’s parents? A can of corn and a can of beans.  Whoops, the sink sprayer came out and disappeared them in a tsunami. (You can do this when you’re my age – not recommended when you’re six).  Later a large bottle of mustard became the grumpy next-door neighbor, Al.   Mrs. Witherspoon transfigured from a nice solid can of bland pumpkin and her friend, Jo, whom she brought to houseguest with the girls, was a leaking jar of pickled pigs’ feet.  Something no one wanted and which oozed an unpleasantness all over the shelves.  How would the Jell-o boxes aka the McCreadys get rid of her before they became infested with her pickled unpleasantness?  And there suddenly was the tension in the story.  Jo was leaking over everything and there’s only so much a box of Jell-o can do.  it is easier to acquire a jar of pickled pigs’ feet than it is to get rid of it.  All happy groceries are alike: each unhappy grocery is unhappy in its own way.  

But before any of these problems could be solved, I had to decide where to put these groceries. To have them live on the kitchen counter would be a lovely homage to The Borrowers but since this was realistic fiction, I decided to put them on an island off the coast of British Columbia. An island like the one I live on. An island with bears and rain forest, ocean, whales, farms, wolves and cougars. A place a bit apart from the busyness of the modern world, and a place a bit out of time as islands often are.   

Here on this island, as on the kitchen counter, anything can happen.  It is this free rein of the imagination that is always writing’s cookie.  To write well you have to feel that you can do absolutely anything you want with your store of groceries.

I once sat down to write a charming little book.  I knew just what I wanted it to be – a book like Edward Eager’s.  It was what I thought people wanted to read. I am always wanting to write what people want to read – it would be wonderful to sell a million books.  But you cannot do it.  You can only write what wants to be written.  Despite knowing that, I was in my deranged and deluded way, giving it the old college try. I knew just where the characters lived – a charming little New England village where the main characters dwelled in a gingerbread house with an old English garden.  I sat down to work on this book every day and every day I fell asleep over my computer.  It was not, as I have said, the book that wanted to be written.  So, I abandoned all those ideas and let ‘er rip.  What I wrote was something much darker, placed in Maine not Massachusetts and there was no charming gingerbread house or old English garden.  Instead, it was deeply forested with bears and mothers who guillotined their own heads right off.  Who will ever read this, I thought.  But the book it became won The National Book Award. I had begun writing with dolls but had had to switch to groceries.  I had, as you must always when you write, entered the land of the unknown and let a can of beans become what it would. My early years on the kitchen counter with a cabinet full of cans and boxes had been, it turned out, a fine training ground. This is how good writing happens, not from our splendid ideas but from our splendid hearts.  Not from what we think will be but from the freedom of not knowing. Maybe.

Meet the author

Polly Horvath has written many books for children.  Her work has received many awards in many countries including a Newbery honor, National Book Award, Canada’s Toronto Dominion Award, the Premio Orbil and the Premio Arpino in Italy and been shortlisted for Germany’s Deutscher Jugenliterturpreis as well as many others.  She lives with her husband on Vancouver Island.  She can found at Pollyhorvath.com

About Pine Island Visitors

By the Newbery Honor author, Polly Horvath, comes a sequel to her popular Pine Island Home about orphaned sisters who find a way to make a new family.

Fiona, Marlin, Natasha, and Charlie McCready have been adopted by their unlikely guardian, Al, and finally settled into their new home on Pine Island in British Columbia. Fiona is struggling under the weight of trying to keep everything together, not to mention worrying about expenses, while Marlin tries to adjust to her new high school while facing rejections for her cookbook, Thirty Meals a Twelve-Year-Old Could Make and Did!. Natasha is still keeping to herself but is looking forward to learning how to play the violin when school starts. And Charlie is dreaming of what kind of dog she would like. It’s been an adjustment, but they are loving being with each other and having Al next door.

Then they receive a letter from Mrs. Witherspoon who took care of them after their parents died and she is coming to visit for three months—an inordinate amount of time for a houseguest. Accommodating a fifth person in the tiny house is hard enough, but to their horror, Mrs. Weatherspoon arrives with a companion, her childhood friend, Jo.

Jo has opinions about everything—what they should eat, how they should behave—and she doesn’t hesitate to express them. And sweet Mrs. Witherspoon seems to have fallen under her spell. When she and Jo announce that they are going to extend their stay even longer, Fiona and Marlin are beside themselves. Fiona hates rocking the boat, but there must be a way to get rid of these grown-up bullies so she and her sisters can have the life they wish to lead.

ISBN-13: 9780823452958
Publisher: Holiday House
Publication date: 10/10/2023
Age Range: 9 – 12 Years

Filed under: Guest Post