Laurel Snyder

It isn’t often someone “gets” it all.  In anyone’s life.  We each have friends who are fun to party with, but don’t have kids the right age for our kids. Or friends who love to knit, but differ from us politically. Or are on another continent, or whatever…

For me, in my writing, I likewise assume that nobody wants to read *all* my various silly projects. The people who read my poetry might not be into my kidlit, and vice versa.  But Kerry Clare, my favorite human being in the world today, gets it ALL!  And I almost cried when I read this. I’m not kidding.

She writes:

From her poem, “Happily Ever After”: “She’s every wolf, every rib, every snarl./ No matter how she tells her story./ No matter what the frame looks like.” I recognized Snyder’s poetry in the prose at the beginning of Scratchy Mountains’ second chapter: “Many years passed, because that is what happens, even when something very sad has taken place. It is the nature of years to pass, and the nature of little girls to grow.”

Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains plays the same kind of game with logic and reality as The Myth of the Simple Machines, similarly inventing a reality constructed in much the same way as our own is but to a different effect. Which is called a fairy tale, I think

This affirms something big. makes me feel like, if certain reviewers pan the book, it’s okay. Because I *do* have a perfect reader out there somewhere.  The book found its way into the hands of the right person somehow.  And that’s the person I wrote it for!

Tags: kerry clare, pickle me this, review, scratchy mountains

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