i give a speech

at the coolest place ever (aka the new york public library)

I recently got the incredible opportunity to give the keynote speech the New York Public Library to an amazing group of children’s librarians. We’re approaching a year of Ruby Lost and Found, and it was wonderful to talk about places we love, people we love, the journeys we go on, cats, and the lasting, life-changing impact of our beloved childhood librarians. Below is a transcript of the speech for The Archive now known as my newsletter.

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Thank you so much to the New York Public Library for having me here today. It’s an honor to stand in your presence and to be able to give this speech. I love the theme about journeys, and so I want to talk about that in my literary and personal life. But first, since Ruby is about places, I want to talk about places, and how I came to be in this place of New York City. 

So I had a friend visiting me a while back. She wanted to know the best places to go in New York. I’ve been in this city for about two years and I consider it home. And so it is a very fair assumption that I know things about this city, like places to see and go and everything that can well equip a tourist. But in reality I am very bad at that. I haven’t actually been to many places of note. When I leave a subway station I still get turned around and confused. When my friends come I beg them to navigate for me. But anyway. This is not a keynote speech about my directional deficiencies, so I’ll leave it at that. All that is to say, my favorite places in this city might not be remarkable to anyone at all. My very favorite place in this city, actually, is a little grocery mart in the West Village. I first walked into that store three years ago, when I was living in New York for the summer, because it was really hot out that day and I wanted to grab a snack and cool down. There was this little gray cat standing there and she came right up to me. I spent a good half hour petting her, and she was so friendly to me, asking for pets, rolling over, as if I was someone she’d known her entire lifetime. I forgot entirely what I came into this store to get. I grabbed a pack of candy to make up for it and walked up to the register, where this very kind elderly man was just watching all this happen. He had a bunch of pictures of the cat framed around the register. I asked him about the cat. He said that she was fourteen years old, and that her name is Candy. I looked at the bag of candy in my hands, and then back at the cat, who was now entrancing yet another visitor, and immediately understood why, and I felt this immense kinship with this man and his beloved sweet kitty who probably charmed so many people to buy candy just so they could spend a little more time with her. And that was the moment I became certain I wanted to live in New York and rearranged my entire future post graduation plans to make that happen. 

There are other places I love in this city that probably are of zero significance to others. I love this one pier on the West Side Highway. I love this tiny garden on Greenwich. I love this one ramen place in Astoria, on my favorite street in the city, because that’s where I go to see one of my best friends all the time. Similarly, Ruby Lost and Found is a book about favorite places. I call it my love letter to San Francisco, because it’s about the city, and about a girl remembering the scavenger hunts she used to do with her grandfather, her Ye-Ye, every single summer, and specifically the last scavenger hunt he did before he passed away. Each year, he would sketch up a scavenger hunt for her that starts at their favorite bakery, and then takes her to places that hold significance for him, or for her, or for the both of them.

The thing is, Ruby Lost and Found is about San Francisco, but it isn’t a guide to the objective best places in San Francisco. I should say that if you are looking to travel to San Francisco, Ruby Lost and Found should not be at the top of the list of books to read. She doesn’t go to the Golden Gate Bridge, or Lombard street, or any places of architectural and historical significance. Instead, she goes to a small Japanese eraser shop. She plays Go with her grandfather in an unassuming park. She goes to a butterfly exhibit at the science museum because she did a class project on pollinators and her grandfather thinks she’d love the exhibit. She goes to the bakery in Chinatown every year, this bakery that is tucked in the corner of the city, because of the delicious treats, because t the place that holds significance for her and her grandfather. It’s the place her grandparents reconnected decades ago and fell in love. During the course of the book, when Ruby’s spending the summer after her Ye-Ye passes grounded with her grandmother at a Chinatown senior center and when she realizes that this beloved bakery is at risk of folding and being priced out because of the very present issue of gentrification, she wants — and tries — to do everything she can to save this place, because it’s her favorite place, because it’s the place where her grandfather is most present. This story, of course, is inspired by my own late grandparents, who took care of me since my parents both worked full time. They would always take me to my favorite places in the neighborhood, similar to Ruby’s scavenger hunts. And they would never pass up a Chinatown bakery.

Ultimately, Ruby Lost and Found is about a girl and her grandfather who cared enough to create scavenger hunts for her, about her grandmother, who is slowly losing her memory to dementia, and her community and city, which is changing beyond her recognition. These people form the throughline of her hometown for her. This book is about the time in her life when she makes the heartbreaking and very human realization that everybody eventually does - that sometimes you don’t actually have as much time as you think you do with the people you love. But they do linger in the places that you shared together, and that memory returns to you again, and again. Sometimes on my runs through Central Park, I see these worn-down benches with placards that hold so much devotion and optimism and dedication. I think about the one bench I saw the other day, where this entire extended family wrote a note to their daughter who was about to come into the world and told her how excited they were for her arrival. The placard dates back to 1966. I think of her now, this woman walking around in the world, and how sweet and extraordinary it is that she has a bench to herself, this special place in Central Park forever. She didn't need to do a single thing or prove herself to receive this love. It was already always hers to keep. And I think that really is what location and geographies mean to me; that our memories and experiences and people we love anchor us to certain places and once they do, even the most ordinary and unassuming of places are changed forever for us. 

I want to shift gears and talk about my writing and publishing journey. I know when writers talk about their careers and trials and tribulations in publishing, it’s always a hero’s journey of some sort. We talk about the piles of rejection that we have to slog through. We talk about the hundreds of No’s that we got, and that one life-changing instance in which we get that one yes, and another, until we finally see our book on the shelves in front of us. But today I won’t talk about the moment my agent offered representation, or the moment I first got the news that I would be a published author. I want to talk about the most important rejection of my professional life and the person who gave that to me.

This was nine years ago and I had been querying already for a year. This was a great powerhouse agent. I’d attended one of her writing seminars, one of those Writer’s Digest ones. She had liked my query and requested my manuscript. And a month or so later, she rejected me, and it was crushing. But this rejection letter was almost a page long. Usually agent rejections on manuscripts aren’t more than a few sentences. It’s fully understandable — they have so much to do, and so many books to read, so they simply don’t have the time for detailed feedback. But this one agent took the time of day to do it. She gave me precise and thought-provoking notes that I couldn’t have come up with myself, and she wished me the best. And that was the best thing that anyone could do for my career at the time, because the truth was, my book wasn’t good enough then. It would have been so easy for her to pass on it with a brief note. But she sat down, and said kind things about the book, and pointed out the ways it could be better. I revised it with her notes in mind, and I grew and learned as a writer, and eventually, that was the book that did get me my agent a year later. My journey doesn't end there. That book went out on submission and didn't sell. I walked away from writing for years. I finally came back to write a practice novel that I thought would help me re-learn the joy of writing and that book became my debut novel, Clues to the Universe. But this agent's rejection back in 2015, this passing act of compassion made a difference to the trajectory of my career as a writer. 

We have never crossed paths since. There have been other incredible people who have helped me to get to where I am today. I could write entire other speeches on how much I love my literary agent, how lucky I am to get to work with my editors, and how fortunate I am to have my friends and my family and my support system. I have also gotten many other rejections since, some helpful, some not. But when I think about the defining moments of my publishing career, I think of this agent, this one kind person who reached out to help me when I was alone, and lost, and gave me the time of day. 

There is one last person that I want to talk about, and I saved the best for the last. I want to talk about my middle school librarian, Mrs. Cronin. 

Mrs. Cronin is the smartest person I know, and she cares more about books than anybody. My English teacher would say that Mrs. Cronin read a book a day and that’s not even an exaggeration. We would have library time about once a month. We got the after recess slot, so we were a bunch of sweaty sixth graders who were now confined to a very quiet room full of books. But Mrs. Cronin managed to make books fun and engaging. She would make entire PowerPoint decks with detailed summaries of the books that she wanted to talk about. She would pitch the books that had just been released that she was excited for. If you expressed even a whiff of passing intrigue, she’d place it in your hands and encourage you to check it out. She made sure to keep the shelves well-stocked with everything she could get. And if you had read a book in a series and liked it, she would move heaven and earth to buy the rest of the books. 

We had these reading lists every year, these state-mandated or district mandated lists, the standard ones that we get in our English classes. Those books are very significant, and there’s a reason why they’re assigned every year. But not everyone resonates with every classic book on every list. Mrs. Cronin wanted to find the best books for each and every one of her students. And she was sharp. She observed the books that we checked out. She asked about them when we returned them, and she could tell if we liked them, or if we didn’t. And the next time we all visited her library, she made sure to personally recommend a book that she thought that we would like based on what we had read. 

Her superpower, above everything, were her recommendations. I remember that she noticed I liked the Fablehaven series, and she recommended me Gregor the Overlander. She noticed that I liked Wendy Mass, so she recommended me Rebecca Stead, who has written some of my favorite books, who has since become my North Star when I write my middle grades. She noticed that I had already read the Giver, and so she recommended me the dystopian YA books that were just coming out at that time, most notably, Legend by Marie Lu, which I would say is the book that made me want to write children’s literature. She would place the books she thought we would like on the front display shelf, where it could easily be reached and seen and noticed. She read all the books that were more obscure or hadn’t really made it onto any lists, or had less attention, and she gave equal push to those. Of course she had read all the classics. Of course she knew which books had been part of the literary canon for decades. But still she took the time to get to know all of us and recommend the books that she knew that we would want to read, with stories that were personally resonant with us. Just like how Ruby’s grandfather takes painstaking care to craft the scavenger hunt stops that he thinks will have meaning for her, my middle school librarian transformed that blank slate of a library, that vast and intimidating collection, into a navigable space. It trained me to search for the books that I wanted, to seek out the stories that lay beyond standard lists, and to find the stories that would go on to resonate with me, teach me about the world, and save my life. 

Mrs. Cronin also took notice that I wasn’t only a reader, but that I was a writer as well.  This was something I didn’t know how to express. Writing seems like a nebulous hobby. It’s not something like organized sports or something that everyone does. My librarian was the first person I told that I wanted to write books. I was also a kid who, like many kids in middle school, like Ruby in my book, was in a hard and weird social space. Friendships were changing, school was hard, and everything was complicated. I was very shy and withdrawn. So, naturally, I spent a lot of lunches in the library. And Mrs. Cronin took notice. She made a Creative Writing club, which would meet weekly in the library on Tuesdays. She pulled in kids from other classes, kids who also quietly loved reading and loved writing, like me. And she sat and ate lunch with us while we would all go in a circle sharing our stories. She made these solitary lunches into a shared space, where we could all connect with each other. That was my community. And the best MFA program ever.

To this day I am still realizing the magnitude of my librarian’s efforts to instill the love of books and writing. She gave up her lunches so kids would feel less lonely. She took the time to get to know everyone. She brought so much unbounded dedication to her job, to a middle school no less, to a bunch of antsy kids who probably preferred to be at recess. But she made us care about books. Because of her we learned that reading is a personal journey, and that there is a book for everyone, and that there are so many stories that will connect with us if we care to seek it out.

So I talk about all these personal stories because these are the people who formed the throughline of my journey for me. I’m here because of my grandparents, who gave me my love of Chinatown and so much more. I’m here because of kind industry professionals who decided to point me in the right direction. And above all, I’m here because of my childhood librarian, who gave me my love of books, who believed in me so much that I started believing in myself. 

I am deeply humbled to be here today with the most impressive, accomplished, and passionate librarians of New York. Stories are the most important things we have during this time. They are the facilitators of information and empathy. They help us bear witness to the world. Sharing those stories is a crucial undertaking. As authors, our stories would simply be these lonely, untethered islands floating around the ether if not for your advocacy and outreach and excitement. The work that librarians do is tireless and often under appreciated. I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the immense conviction and necessary courage it takes, in this day and age, with books being banned and contested, to face down that bigotry and vitriol and safeguard that truth-seeking. You seek out stories and help shape the formative years of children and their own journeys. You hand them books that can change the trajectories of their lives, or form their own ideas and opinions, or serve as lifelines, or help them see themselves and feel less alone in this world. Libraries are safe havens for many kids. Helping them navigate that space, to seek out the stories and books that matter to them, to make all this accessible to them, makes a universe of difference to kids. I know it did for me. 

I love the New York public library. I love New York. It’s my favorite place I’ve lived in so far, and I’ve lived across the country. I grew up in the Midwest, and then went to California for my college years, and now I’m here. I’ve been to my fair share places in between. In each city one of the first things I do is to look up where the library is. At the end of the day that is always my anchor. There is always a library. In Ruby Lost and Found, it’s also no mistake that the second scavenger hunt stop, after the bakery, is a little free library. It is one of the things that makes her city home for her. Thank you so much for being here, for the work that you do, and thank you for this time.

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Note: this speech has been edited for clarity and conciseness.