The Other Half of the Book

This week in Texas, nine young writers received prizes for doing something remarkable. They wrote letters to authors.

The Letters About Literature contest asks students to select a book, poem, essay, or speech and write to the author—living or dead—explaining how the work changed their view of themselves or the world. More than a thousand Texas students entered this year. The winners were announced on March 17.

Dalia Goldman, ten years old, wrote to Lois Lowry about Number the Stars. Emily Rigoulot, thirteen, wrote to Lowry about The Giver. Sophia Haagenson, seventeen, wrote to Jewell Parker Rhodes about Ninth Ward. Zak Hu, also seventeen, wrote to Atul Gawande about Being Mortal.

These are not book reports. They are testimonies. A ten-year-old in Bellaire tells Lois Lowry how a story about a Danish girl hiding her Jewish friend during the Holocaust made her understand courage differently. A seventeen-year-old in Carrollton tells a surgeon how a book about mortality changed the way he thinks about what matters at the end of life.

First-place winners receive $300. Their school libraries receive $300 grants. They receive travel stipends to attend the Texas Library Association conference to accept their awards. But the real prize is something else. The real prize is the letter itself—the act of telling an author, “You changed how I see the world.”

Lois Lowry has been receiving letters like these for decades. She has thought carefully about what they mean.

“Early on I came to realize something,” she said in an interview. “Kids at that pivotal age, 12, 13 or 14, they’re still deeply affected by what they read, some are changed by what they read, books can change the way they feel about the world in general.”

In her Newbery Award acceptance speech for The Giver, Lowry described what happens when a child opens a book: “Each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere. It gives him choices. It gives him freedom. Those are magnificent, wonderfully unsafe things.”

But Lowry understands something else too. She knows writing is not a solitary act. “The writer after all is only half the book,” she has said. “The other half is the reader.”

The other half is the reader.

The Power of Authors begins here. A writer puts words on a page. A reader receives them. And sometimes—not always, but sometimes—the reader writes back.

That is the covenant. Writers write so readers can respond. The book is incomplete until someone reads it and is changed by it. The letter proves the change happened.

Somewhere this week, an author will open an envelope and find a letter from a stranger. The letter will say: “I read your book. It changed something in me.” The author will understand that the work is finished now. The other half of the book has arrived.

If you have ever been changed by a book, tell the author. If the author is dead, tell someone else. If no one will listen, write it down anyway. The testimony matters. It completes the work.

The writer is only half the book. You are the other half.

The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen explores what it means to write with purpose — and why a book built on conviction has no expiration date.

The book is available on Amazon: http://bit.ly/3K6o8AM. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.

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