Anything is Possible. Everything is Possible.

by Marion Dane Bauer

Norma and I met for the first time more than a decade ago.  We met at what we came to refer to as the series of school visits from hell.  We were some place in Nebraska.  I don’t remember where in Nebraska, but that doesn’t matter much, because the woman who carted us around from school to school has, I’m sure, no memory of us either.  She couldn’t even remember our names when she was gathering us at the hotel or loading and unloading us at one school or another.

What I do remember clearly is the quiet of the exhausted evenings when Norma and I walked together . . . walked and talked.  We had just met, but we each opened a door to the other.  In the years that followed that door never closed.  Norma:  an urbanite, an Easterner, a Jewish woman of a non-religious bent, a devoted wife.  (That phrase is trite—devoted wife—but Norma’s devotion was anything but trite).  Me:  a small-town Midwestern lesbian who had just catapulted out of a long-time marriage to an Episcopal priest.  We could hardly have been more different in our backgrounds.  And yet we touched one another instantly.  I discovered in those first evenings together that Norma could hear me—really hear me—no matter what I said.  I believe she found the same in me.  I came home from Nebraska knowing I had made a friend for life.

But then Norma touched many, many people over the years.  She touched us with her writing.  She touched us with her teaching.  She touched us simply with her being.

Everyone who knows Norma knows what an astonishing writer she was.  With her husband, Harry, she helped lay the foundation for the entire field of young adult fiction.  But beyond having written many fine books, Norma is proof to me of something I needed to know . . . that a strong career can build and build and go on building.  That it doesn’t have to hit the descending side of a natural bell curve.  It’s something I longed to have proof of for many years.

At a time when I was so deep into my own writing that I hardly knew anything else existed, I read one of those all-knowing articles one encounters from time to time.  The writer described the bell curve that, he maintained, plays itself out in every writer’s career.  The peak of the bell, the writer said, comes in the thirties for short story writers, in the forties for novelists.  After that . . . descent.  

I was well into my forties when I read the article, and I was appalled.  Would all that lay before me be diminishment?  Had I already done the best work I could possibly do?  I looked around at careers more mature than mine, and I wasn’t reassured.  Too often I could see the far side of that bell curve playing itself out.  These were people who would have said, proudly, that they were now doing their best work, but the pattern of descent was clearly there.  I was in despair.

But all that was before I came to know Norma.  Not only was her writing career long and distinguished, but I watched the quality of her work build, year after year.  In her latest books, The Missing Girl, What I Believe, Has Anyone Seen My Emily Greene?, she extended the range of her work beyond anything she had done before.  She found new energy, new ideas, a new voice.  She found parts of herself and her craft she had never explored in earlier books.  And she did the best work of her life.

Norma has been energy and light and grace for many, many people.  She has been a fine artist, a gifted teacher, a fiercely loving wife and mother   . . .  and an absolutely steadfast friend.  For me she has also been a beacon of hope. 

Anything is possible.  Everything is possible.  Norma did it.