“You guys ready for a story?” Gary D. Schmidt asked the sixth graders of Charlotte Latin School, who were assembled in Anne’s Black Box on February 5. Eschewing a microphone, he told them the gripping tale of three Animal Control workers summoned to the middle of the San Francisco Bay and their efforts to liberate a 40-foot whale entangled in steel cords and encrusted with hooks and debris. The students periodically gasped and applauded.

Schmidt, this year’s visiting Middle School Author, has won the Newbery Honor and been a finalist for the National Book Award; his bibliography includes First Boy, Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boys, and The Labors of Hercules Beal. His visit was financed with support from Parents’ Council. 

Mild-mannered in affect, Schmidt nevertheless had the students rapt as he told the story behind his book The Wednesday Wars and the moment when inspiration struck and he needed to write down the idea without a pen and paper handy: in a pinch, he discovered, a purple crayon on the inside of a Milky Way wrapper would do the job.

He also told stories about American history and his own life: growing up, he wanted nothing more than to attend the Naval Academy in Annapolis, but was rejected when a vision test revealed that he was completely color-blind. “You guys all look really cool in all the gray clothes you’re wearing,” he joked.

Students asked him questions about how long it takes him to write a book (two years), what his next book will be (a ghost story), and his favorite soda. “Where I come from, it’s a favorite pop,” he said. (He lives in Michigan.) “And it’s obviously Dr. Pepper, right?”

Schmidt gave three talks in the Black Box, one for each grade of Middle School. On a break between sessions, he chatted while he signed copies of his own books in the Knight-Dickson Library. He discussed how it was a deliberate choice to work without a microphone or visual aids, designed to focus a young audience on the essence of narrative: “It isn’t often that we listen to somebody tell a story with no bells and whistles.” And he explained why he has focused on books for the middle grades, although he’s also written picture books for younger readers and academic books for adults on subjects ranging from the author Hannah Adams to the medieval image of the mouth of hell (he recently retired as an English professor at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, MI). From Schmidt’s perspective, the middle grades are when people start figuring out what they believe in, not just recapitulating the opinions of adults around them. The way children of that age careen between maturity and immaturity puts him in a uniquely powerful position as a writer, he said, allowing him to explore some fundamental truths about life.

The fundamental truth Schmidt wanted to imprint on those Middle School students in the Black Box was the value of fiction. “All stories, without exception, start with a question and end with a question. A book is supposed to give you questions, not easy answers,” he told them. “The purpose of all art is to give you more to be a human being with.”