M. T. Anderson Charms Sheboygan

Beautiful lake-side Sheboygan hosted its second annual Children’s Book Festival on October 14-16. I drove 90 minutes east on Saturday, October 15, to join 3 dozen teens and adults listen to Matthew Tobin Anderson speak on the mythology of American landscape.

We gathered at 1:00 at Sheboygan’s Mead Public Library. It’s a wide-windowed library, one clearly well-loved and well-funded. The third floor holds the children’s library as well as the Maas Teen Learning Center, a long conference-like room wrapped in aqua and cobalt blue. I studied the orange, green, and maize squares of the carpet while eavesdropping as a volunteer encouraged Anderson to order something to eat between sessions. He responded with gentle embarrassment, asking her often “Really?” and then joking of needing a filet mignon, medium-rare.

His voice, by the way, is as rich as James Spader’s. Think Steff in “Pretty in Pink.” Yet he’s funny and disarming. My god, it’s like he’s Duckie and Steff rolled into one—how’s a girl to learn anything when confronted with such a package? Especially when the package is wearing salmon-colored All Stars.

He began his 30-minute talk, and I did my best to pay attention. I was distracted by visions of my parents NOT having moved from Massachusetts when I was a baby. Then Anderson and I could have been next-door neighbors. We could have biked to the Carnegie-era brick library together and whispered among the pages of Conan the Barbarian, writing fake names in the yellowed check-out cards.

Clearly, I’m crushing on the M. T. Where is his fan page? I looked. Couldn’t find one. Seriously? No one is tracking his tours? What he had for lunch? (It was a ham sandwich.) Come on, cyber world. Start obsessing about quality, will you? There’s quality here, wearing pinkly-orange Chucks.

Okay—back to the conference room. Anderson began with a humble note that he’d had only one connection to Wisconsin—he had met our Butter Queen at a friend’s wedding. “I had expected her to be a greasier, more gelatinous creature,” he quipped, “but she was quite a lovely person.”

Landscape was his topic—our own rugged, revised American landscape. His devotion to landscape developed as a child reading adventure stories and histories that recorded folks doing on paper what largely is lost in the lives of the modern American: discovering vast, howling wildernesses. He was enraptured by the romance of geography and the mood of space.

How right and yet how surprising for me to consider America full of romance and mood. I fall into the spell—as he notes many writers do—of the magic of medieval Europe, of its henges and moors, its castles and lochs. But America is rich with its own witchery and lore. To that end, Anderson makes a point of collecting local ghost stories. Not only do they detail new, often private locations, but they poignantly display what he describes as the poetry of American emptiness—that loneliness that comes with night time walks in wide meadows and deep forests. The tellers of these tales, he says, are often more entertaining than the ghosts, themselves.

I have learned that author Linda Godfrey collected Wisconsin’s monster stories and is sharing them at the Neenah Library in a couple of weeks. My middle schoolers and I will be in the front row. How perfect an opportunity to experience local ghost stories with newly-opened minds. We will hear not only about UFO sightings and haunted locales, but we will hopefully see the landscape of our own state unfold ornately before us.

His presentation included layers of tales about a small settlement named Dog Town in Massachusetts. I suppose it would be rude for me to reproduce his notes, right? In brief, he showed pictures of the current location and told stories of the town from the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. The stories built up: what did happen, what happened in reaction to what happened, what happened on top of that, and then Anderson’s own jokey bits added on top of that—all of the area’s history of sadness, all of the magic of human involvement and connection, and all of the loneliness of the trees and boulders that carry centuries of secrets—these things together build landscape.

Landscape should be a more emotionally potent force in our stories than even our characters.

Now are we all in love? Because we should be. A Harvard-educated, National Book Award-winning author just shared brilliant stuff that will change our books forever, and he did it with generosity of spirit and maybe even a twinkle in his eye.

During Q & A time, an enthusiastic teen asked how in the world Anderson wrote in such varying voices. Particularly, Whales on Stilts contrasts with the sober tone of The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing. Anderson revealed that he actually wrote those books simultaneously. Researching his 18th century story thrust him deep into that odd, stylized, gracious tone that referred to breeches, not pants, and required specific buckles on each shoe. Giving himself a holiday, he created the Pals in Peril series. Taking three or four weeks to write Whales on Stilts, he got his irreverence out, and he was ready to revisit Octavian’s sobriety.

His books were piled for purchase in the children’s library, and I picked up both Octavian Nothing and the latest Pals in Peril. I stood between a group of four teens, each holding a copy of Feed, and an area teacher carrying two or three plastic bags bulging with books. I thought it was fantastic how he so clearly delights readers of all ages.




This is M.T. Anderson NOT in Sheboygan. I have no pictures of him in Sheboygan because I was a bit too shy. But look at the socks. And read his books and website. And fall in love as you should and must.