Mary Lyn Ray

I live in an old house on an old farm in New Hampshire, where I'm always listening for stories just before they have words. Most grow around what I've met or lived and what matters to me and the ways that memory and mysteries and small occasions of wonder show themselves. Other story may attach to that, and what-if may enlarge it; but that's where each begins. I was a long time learning to call myself a writer. Wanting to write was one of the big secrets I had always known myself by. Even before I could read, I loved words and language. I wanted to make what writers made. But when a teacher in second grade said, "Take a piece of paper and write a story," I had no clue how to. Believing I wasn't smart enough, I went through school facing blank paper and feeling as blank in front of it--except when, just for myself, I was drawing with words. Real writing, I thought, required some ability I didn't have. For nearly twenty years it seemed I'd found my work in museums. And it was there I became acquainted with shaping story, without seeing that was its name: the story in things, in intentional and unintentional art, and in how our histories reveal themselves. But something more was edging in. Stories that had seemed of another kind began, of themselves, to come. I had been wrong thinking they had to be somehow invented or willed from nothing. I began to see that hints are everywhere and anywhere, asking for voice. I began to sense what had story around it. I love the necessary spareness of a picture book, the challenge of trying to tell something that matters in the smallest way it can be said. I love picture book form and the drama that happens in turning a page. I'm kept alert knowing that it's children I'm writing for. I love, too, their openness to language and to this world they've fallen into and the natural poetry they live with. And I love the unexpected ways that stories bloom when told in words and pictures together. I also want to think that we never have to outgrow picture books and what they invite us into.