Acknowledgments: A Thanksgiving Essay

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. 

And today I did one of the last things you do when making a manuscript into a book: the acknowledgments.

As some of you know, my acknowledgments can sometimes get to be A LOT OF FEELINGS.

This one is one of those. It became a real essay, much as the Space Opera ackies did. So because it is the day for saying thanks, I wanted to post it here so you could all read it, because I think there's a lot more there than just some thank yous, and I'm proud of the piece. So until April 26, you guys have exclusive dibs on this one.

I love you all. Thank you for everything. 

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Acknowledgments

One cold, rainy Monday morning when I was in 5th grade, my teacher, Mr. Danielson (Mr. D to all of us) stood up in front of the class with no lesson on the board. In fact, there would not be any lessons that week at all.

Instead, he was going to tell us a story.

For six days. Seven hours a day.

But before he started, Clark Danielson made us all swear that we would never, ever discuss that story with anyone who hadn’t been a student in his class at some point and heard it themselves. Not even our parents. It was a secret, our secret, and we were to take it absolutely seriously.

We did. Of course we did! And because we did, and I still do, I’m not going to tell you about Mr. D’s epic story. I have, to this day, only ever talked about it with my brother, who was in his class six years later.

Thirty ten-year-olds sat transfixed by a story told out loud without a soundtrack or a tie-in game for seven hours a day.

But I think, for my entire career, I have been trying to share with other people the extraordinary, tense, tingling, magical feeling I had sitting in that hard, uncomfortable public school chair that morning, swearing never to tell anyone the story of magic and space and time I was about to hear from a wise old man. As if stories were something that important. As if they were thatpowerful. As if they could change you.

Of course, the real secret, the most terrible and wonderful and frightening secret is: they are. They can.

And as for wise old men, well. As I am sitting at my desk (with a slightly more comfortable chair) writing this on a cold rainy Monday morning in November on the opposite end of the country, a little quick Googling and quicker math tells me Mr. Danielson was all of 45. Three years older than I am now. And I laugh at the leaves and the moss and the damp and the grey outside my window because my god, he was so young, and he seemed like Gandalf to us.

I don’t think many teachers would be allowed to stop teaching for a whole week to tell a story nowadays. Epic quests and love and tragedy and impregnable cities aren’t on standardized tests. And keeping a secret from our parents? Not a chance.

But it changed my life then. Mr. Danielson was just about the only person in that school who was nice to me, the awkward loud geeky girl with a haircut that ought to have been punishable by law who couldn’t even fit in with the geeks. I already loved stories and storytelling, but what he taught me was that stories could bind you to other people, forever, could be full of all kinds of whimsical things and still be desperately important. Could make strangers a family.

What a wild freewheeling magic to bring into a classroom with drop ceilings in a far suburb of Seattle just as the 90s were dawning. What a legend.

I’ll tell you another secret, since you’ve made it this far in a part of novels that most people skip completely. A much smaller secret, but still important, because everything is.

All acknowledgments are stories about love.

Even the very shortest ones, the ones that are just a list of names readers don’t recognize.

Still about love.

The people we loved and who loved us while we were writing a book, and that span includes all the years leading up to the first word and a good while after the last one. An accounting of the gifts given to a book at its fairy christening. Those who said or did things sometime between our birth and the whirr of the printing presses that made this particular tale at this particular time what it had to be, that made it the tale we particularly had to tell. Those who gave us their faith and their time and their labor; those to whom we gave our faith and our time and our labor. Those who took care of us or helped us while we went out into the wilderness where stories live to try to catch and keep one and bring it home to hang on the wall over the hearth.

Those we lost while we were hunting.

As with many books that come out in 2022, simple math will tell you I wrote the bulk of Osmo Unknown during the very worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. I do not recommend this. I also recognize that by using those words, I fix this work so specifically in a time and a place, a time and a place that will mark everyone who experienced it for the rest of our lives, however short or long that may be. Just in case you’re reading this in 2050 or something and we managed to escape the price that dinosaur magic demanded for its service: one of the little-discussed symptoms of the pandemic is we all lost our filters and get waytoo real at the drop of a mask. So strap in, it’s full of feelings in here and no one knows how to lock the door anymore.

Over the course of the writing and editing of this book, I lost seven family members, and an eighth became very, very sick.

Another thing I do not recommend is writing a fairy tale that primarily takes place among ghosts in the afterlife while your loved ones die around you and the world shuts down.

It is…less than ideal. I am no pangirlin, I did not thrive so alone.

I don’t have anywhere else to put their names so that they last. At least as long as trade paperbacks last.

Goodbye, Albert Valenty, my great-uncle on the East Coast. I’m sorry you didn’t like my red book. I’ll do better next time.

Goodbye, George Henry, my great-uncle on the West Coast. Thank you for being so good to my aunt when so many in her life were not.

Goodbye John Barris and Vadim Zagidulin. You were both storytellers; you just never got paid for it. I am sorry I wasn’t better when I ought to have been. I tried. I always tried.

Goodbye, Margaret Meagher, my grandmother-in-law. I will always remember and treasure that day with the Golden Wattle Cookbook in your kitchen, and that little stolen overheard moment of pride in your family at the Christmas barbecue that year.

Goodbye, Jack Thomas. My grandfather. I’m sorry I wasn’t there. You’ve alwaysbeen there, for all of us, and I’m so glad you got to see so much of our lives. You are, and always were, why September is from Omaha. Please hug Grammy Carolyne for me. I will miss you both forever.

Goodbye, Michael Miller. My father-in-law. Who is hands down one of the kindest people I've ever even heard about. Who told me to call him Dad eight days after meeting me. Whose birthday, by one of those magics so little people just call them coincidences, is today. The Great Last Bird. I’m so sorry the world ended and we couldn’t be by your side. I’m so sorry you only got to see your grandson once—but at least there was the once. I should have taken you to Worldcon. Nobody gets what they want, as the sign says. To me, you are always driving me to that reading through the Western Australian sunshine and telling me that even then, even that very day, you never in your life felt older than fifteen.

You never were, not by one hour. None of us are.

And Cynthia Thomas, my Aunt Cyndi, who is still with us as I type, and I hope somehow stays that way, you are one of the least tame humans I ever met, and I love you, and it isn’t fair.

None of it’s fair. I don’t know what happens when we die, whether its clouds or circles or nothing or a forest and a river and a desert of sweetness or if we all come back and do this dance again, but I know it’s not fair. What a terribly designed system! I should like to speak to the engineers.

I don’t know what matters most in the end either, not really, though I have my suspicions. But I know what Mr. Danielson did for me. I know how long that’s lasted, with no signs of letting up.

And I know I’ve at least wasted a great deal of paper trying to make all the love I’ve got a thing that can be read out loud and shipped through the mail and resold for a dollar to a secondhand shop and reviewed poorly on Goodreads. This book you’re holding, and every book you hold, is a moment, a time and a place and a moment, made solid and manifest so that it could find you, across so much distance and so many years, and allow me to, very quietly, hold your hand. You and I were born to be strangers and have defied the laws of everything to connect through a mushed-up tree and some flax and soybeans, and a whole lot of wild brilliant astonishing dead dinosaurs.

Did you know that? Industrial ink is made from flax, like the fairy tale about the girl who spun flax with her bare hands to save her brothers, and soybean oil, like the fairy tale about the boy who climbed to the sky on a beanstalk, and petroleum, which comes from the extremely weird process by which fossilized corpses of giant lizards turn into oil that make our cars go and our lights glow and our words fly.

And they say there’s no such thing as magic.

I have tried to bring Mr. Danielson’s magic to this book about understanding other people and loving the world for what it is, not only for what it could be if only everyone agreed with us all the time. By telling you about that day in 5th grade, I hope I’m making him a little famous, because he should be. I hope I’m spreading that spell much further than the boundaries of King County, Washington. And I hope I am making clear the grave and awesome power of what one single teacher can do for a child.

I doubt Mr. D remembers me out of the hundreds of children he taught over the decades. (And that’s ok!) But I remember him, and, well, as the old commercials used to say, this Bud, and this book, is for you.

But not only him. For my family who is gone, and my family who remains.

As for those who looked after me, thank you to my wonderful agent Howard Morhaim, my patient editor Kate Proswimmer and all four editors that came before her in the circuitous progress of this book: Kristin Otsby, Annie Nybo, Karen Wojtyla, and Ruta Rimas as well as Justin Chanda at Simon & Schuster, the wonderful artist Lauren Myers who brought Osmo’s world to life with her illustrations and the gorgeous cover, my turtles and first readers, Cylia Amendolara, Kris McDermott, and Sarah Schmeer, my dear Rebecca Frankel, Laura Fitton and her two children, Sue and Z, my online community in general but very specifically, my Patreon subscribers, especially Sean Elliott, my assistant Chanie Beckman, the staff at the Peaks Island Children’s Workshop, Katie, Sallie, Sharoan, and Arria, my husband Heath Miller, his mother Donna Meagher, and my son Sebastian (who falls more securely into the category of those I cared for, but true care never goes only one way). You were so small when I wrote this, but never think I was so busy the fact that your first word was technically a roar didn’t make an impression.

As for those who shaped this particular tale, thank you Seanan McGuire for once making me write a story about autumn for very little money, and the attendees of Åcon 2011 in Finland, who shared so much Finnish folklore with me in exchange for a really huge bag of candy.

The pandemic is not thanked. For anything. Ever.

And thank you, too. For reading. For caring. For being.

I suppose what I want to say to the very specific (and excellent) kind of person who reads all the way to the end of the acknowledgments, is that things always get hard, even if you do everything right—and no one does everything right. Some books, and some times, and some people, and some problems, are harder than others. Ever so much harder than a lonely ten-year-old girl in a classroom that was still pretty hopped up on the amazing technology of Oregon Trail could ever imagine.

And when things get hard, which remember, they always will, you have to find the magic. It sounds like a shallow thing to say, but it’s not, that’s what you figure out when you get really old, like, I don’t know, 45ish. Magic isn’t very easy to see and harder to feel and people don’t take it very seriously. Just like it’s so difficult to really see the story of love in a million terse acknowledgments in the front or back of novels. The mushed-up tree and the flax and the dinosaurs. Taking care of people, and being taken care of. Inspiring, and being inspired. Buying a book and letting it change you. All your children’s children living long enough for you to see their adulthoods. Babies that roar like lions. Stealing a bust of Lenin that was actually Lunacharsky with your best friend and both your girlfriends, never guessing all four of you would be Americans long before the century changed. An old broken car made so new and beautiful it saved people. An old Australian cookbook that tells you how to tan hides and cook brains and preserve flowers. A hat you bought when you were so young and on the make in Chicago becoming your granddaughter’s treasured talisman. Oregon Trail. Cold Novembers. Former punk musicians making tamales with their kids in the Colorado light. Looking in the mirror and seeing fifteen. Finding someone who loves you the way you need to be loved. Loving someone the way they need to be loved. And maybe, sometimes, when you’ve had a really nice day, loving everyone like that. The 45-year-old Gandalf saying guess what screw the curriculum this week and somehow being allowed to do it.

The secret of a story.

I don’t really see things getting less hard for the world any time soon. I’m sorry about that. We all meant to do better for you. By you. By ourselves, too. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t give to have a real stone that would let us all feel, really feel, what it’s like to live, really live, as each other for a moment.

But the only thing I know like that in the real world is a book.

I wrote this because I love you, whoever you are. I really do. I love you and I love this dumb silly poorly-designed locked-up world and I wish nobody ever had to leave before the lights go up at the end of the show and everyone claps and smiles and throws flowers and leans their heads on the shoulders of the folks they came with and gathers their coats while talking about how good it all was, and all their favorite parts. Because that’s what I want it to be like, on the other side. Just intermission.

And hey, maybe it is. I’ve seen stranger magic.

Remember the Stone. Keep the secret and share the story. Say what’s inside you, say it loud, don’t wait.

And if things get especially hard, come and find me and tell me you’re one of Mr. D’s kids. Because if you read all this, you are. One step removed is barely removed at all. And I will buy you something warm to drink and sit with you by a big window and together we will be wild and wise and canny Quidnunx whose every thought has a color time streams by on the other side of the glass.

After all, we’re family now.