Process Talk: Marion Dane Bauer on We, the Curious Ones

I read Marion Dane Bauer’s books long before I met her. As a newbie on faculty at the legendary Writing for Children and Young Adults MFA program at what was then Vermont College, I was in awe of Marion and dazzled by her many accomplishments. What I have come to realize over years of residencies and conversations and lectures and all the years since, is my sheer good luck that our paths crossed in this way. Marion has a mind that melds curiosity, poetry, and a keen awareness of the young. She can write the clearest scenes I can think of and create chapter books that fool you into assuming they must have been simple to write. Whenever I had students who struggled to understand what it took to write a scene, I’d make them read Marion’s Runt or one of her ghost middle grades.

Marion also mines complex sources like no one else and extracts texts that sweep through time and evolution, mythology, the spiritual, and science. See my posts on this magnificent picture book, The Stuff of Stars.

Now there’s a companion title, We, the Curious Ones, illustrated by Mumbai artist duo and couple, Hari and Deepti. I was fortunate enough to run alongside while Marion wrote the text. I read drafts and asked random questions but mostly marveled at how a gifted writer builds her text. It’s now a book that opens up to accommodate the perfect picture book reading configuration—a child poring over mysterious pictures and a grownup reading exquisite words:

[Uma] Your afterward tells us that the seed for this book lay in Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli. How do you go from reading a book on physics to writing this love song to human curiosity? 

[Marion] That does seem like a leap, doesn’t it?  But Rovelli doesn’t just talk about physics in this fascinating book.  He talks about our changing perception of our world.  I was deeply struck by the ways our storieshave changed, and I was struck, also, by the painful transition an entire society makes each time we are compelled let an old story go.  How grand it must have been to know, without question, that the entire universe revolved around us!

Since I was a child in school I knew that thinkers such as Galileo had been persecuted, even killed.  I was in awe of their determination to discover the truth and to speak it at such cost.  But I never gave much thought to how difficult it must have been for an entire society to give up the comfort of the stories people had been living by.  We have been forced to give up our stories, our certainties about our place in this universe again and again.

Yet we survive.  And we move into new stories.

The time we are living in now feels especially fraught.  There are many reasons for that loss of stability.  One of the most profound, I believe, is that we haven’t yet agreed upon a new story, one that can give us meaning.

[Uma] There are lines which I instantly read as symbolic of the expanding boundaries of human questions:  “the edge that was no edge…” “How could that be…?” And others that pull us back to our smallness in the universe: “dust/ on a planet made of dust…” “wherever we are is the center…” Your thoughts on the tensions between finite and infinite, small and large?

Photo used by permission of MDB, © Tracy Walsh

[Marion] Ah . . . the tension between finite and infinite, small and large.  That is the whole point of this piece, isn’t it?  We are so small, so infinitesimally small, in a universe that seems to go on forever.  How can we exist as specks against such vastness?

In the past we have always told stories, created meaning through stories.  As far as we know, we humans are the only form of life to justify ourselves that way.  It’s unlikely that kittens—or redwood trees—do the same.  Nor do we justify their lives that way.  For ourselves, though, we demand more.

We may be the only species to ask questions, too, and the very act of forming questions changes everything.  Changes us, as well.  It’s because we humans have the courage to keep those questions coming that our understanding of the universe keeps growing.  That we keep growing.

What could be more difficult than to set sail for the edge of our known world, either in a physical boat or in our understanding?  But once we pass that “edge” and find ourselves still here, however altered, what could be more exhilarating?

For so many centuries most—certainly most in the West—were certain that our Earth and we humans on it were the center of all.  The journey from that story to one that tells us we are “dust on a planet made of dust” has been challenging.  Even painful.  I was intrigued, though, to realize that, if the universe is, indeed, infinite, then wherever we stand is still that center we once dreamed.

Our new sense of center is different, though, far less grandiose.  And that surely is a good thing. 

Now we need a new story, one that indigenous people have long known but that the rest of us are just beginning to discover.  It’s a story that tells us we are part of a whole.  Only one part in a vast and wonder-filled and mysterious whole.

And what a blessing that new story is.  I cannot think of a more fruitful or a more comforting way to live out this life we have been given.

Thank you, Marion, for the dogs and the fireflies, the trees that “talk to one another/ underground” and the questions with which this book ends.