by Colleen Alles

The Recipe from The Binnacle Boy

The year I was born, Newberry Medal winner Paul Fleischman published a collection of three long, short stories—one of which features a deaf girl who reads the lips of fellow townspeople as they whisper confessions to a statue of a binnacle boy. This is how she discovers how the entire crew of the Orion was murdered.

The story was impossibly imaginative to me the first time I read it in 5th grade—so much so that years later, I sought out a copy of Graven Images (Candlewick Press). In the book’s afterward—published nearly 25 years later—Fleischman, who writes for young people, does something amazing: he explains where he got the idea.

Or rather, how.

In biology, Fleischman writes in the Afterward, fertilization usually takes two parties; I’ve often found it to be the same with books.

Here’s how it happened: Fleischman had been researching sealers—men who sailed the South Atlantic in the 1800s hunting seals. One detail—a photograph of a boy carved from wood who held a ship’s compass—stayed in his mind. These ornate statues were called binnacle boys. Around the same time, he happened to catch a television program about South America in which a long line of people waited to approach a statue of a saint to pray. He was also reading the Old Testament at the time, thinking about judgmental or pious characters. Lastly, a few memories from his own life bubbled to the surface of his mind—in particular, the time he spent living across the street from a school for the deaf.

This is the magic from which The Binnacle Boy emerged. Devouring Fleischman’s explanation, I was in awe. This is how you do it, I thought. He’s given away the recipe for writing:

¼ cup random facts you find fascinating—the ones that perch on your shoulder and won’t leave you alone, even as you’re falling asleep

¼ cup what you are reading

¼ cup what happened to you this week

¼ cup your most pertinent memories

Double the Recipe for Poetry

So, how does Fleischman’s generous recipe sharing connect to the world of poetry? I think the same recipe can be used to create meaningful and impactful poems—that the poems we feel in our bones come, in part, from this recipe. The more a reader connects with the key ingredients, the more he or she will remember the poem, read it again later, share it with someone else.

Which is what we’ve seen happening lately with a bit of a resurgence of interest in poetry as of late—everything from the influx of Rupi Kaur poems dominating my social media feed to Amanda Gorman’s unforgettable reading at President Biden’s inauguration. My home state is (finally) taking steps to create an official position for a Poet Laureate. When war broke out in Ukraine in late February (rather, when the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine re-escalated in late February of 2022), amidst news articles and opinion pieces, I encountered more than once loved ones sharing the Ilya Kaminsky poem We Lived Happily During the War.

How we heal

Last week, in West Michigan, there was one afternoon when it felt nice to be outside on the back deck, despite the wind and 52-degree temperature. The sun was out. Spring had sprung—kind of. My daughter remembered we’d bought popsicles on our last adventure to the grocery store, and jubilantly licked at her grape treat, insisting she didn’t need a coat.

I sat next to my dog on the deck, idly running my fingers over his ears. I’d learned a few days ago that he would likely need surgery, which didn’t come as a surprise. He’d been struggling for weeks—an injured cruciate ligament. Not life-threatening, but not easy either to watch him limp along on our evening walks—particularly as I use that time to catch up on news podcasts detailing the horrors of Putin initiating attacks on Ukrainian civilians.

At one point, I looked up and saw a cardinal in a high branch of a nearby tree. I watched it hop three times toward a nest I had never noticed. Cardinals make me think of my father—a native of Southern Illinois and lifelong Cardinals stan. He was due to have surgery as well at the end of the month, and while there was no reason to capital-w Worry, I had been thinking about his heart, which doctors had recently noted may need a pacemaker down the line. I’d also been letting go of a friendship that meant a lot to me, yet had grown too threadbare to continue, and I’d had to learn how to let it go, as much as I had wanted to keep holding on.

All of this is to say, suddenly, as the cardinal chirped out, as my daughter grinned at me with purple all over her lips, I wrote a poem in one moment in my head about how when we are hurting, there is always something we can do to take steps away from the depths of our uncertainty and into a place of more optimism, more light, more hope.

I pecked how we heal into my phone in the forty-five seconds before I heard my husband’s truck pull into the driveway, which made the dog bark, and Mara desperately needed to wash her sticky hands, and I was sure it was time to start making dinner—even as I looked forward, later, to taking a longer look at my quickly-drafted lines to see if there was anything in what I’d written worth sharing.

Colleen Alles is an award-winning writer living in West Michigan. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in a number of literary magazines. Her first full-length poetry collection, After the 8-Ball, is available now from Cornerstone Press (the University of Wisconsin, Steven’s Point). Colleen is a graduate of Michigan State University and Wayne State University, and a contributing editor for short fiction at Barren Magazine. When she isn’t reading or writing, she enjoys distance running and spending time with her family, including her beloved hound, Charlie. You can find her online at www.colleenalles.com, on Instagram at ColleenAlles_author, and on Twitter at @ColleenAlles.