The Gazette from Montreal, Quebec, Canada • 81

F1Z SATURDAY. MARCH 21, 2015 MONTREAL GAZETTE Memoir and movie have brought fame to Strayed 1 i r4 'J 4 -e SJ f. 111 1 Ml' i I "I wrote Alligator Pie one day riding on a bike right where we lived. My feet says Dennis Lee, who started writing for children when his oldest child was went around the pedals of the bike, and I started hearing these nutty words," about two years old. mattrbw sherwood for national post Kid itch ampion returns JESSICA CONTRERA WASHINGTON POST WASHINGTON They had come to worship at the altar of Cheryl.

Cheryl, their mentor, their confidante, their "inspiration," they kept saying. "Just such an inspiration And here she was, on stage at National Geographic's headquarters in Washington, her name and her book cover projected onto a wall behind her: Cheryl Strayed, Wild. She is a woman who, in the midst of her flailing 20s (a divorce, her mother's death, a summer of heroin use), went on a gruelling 94-day solo hike of the Pacific Crest Trail, and who, nearly 20 years later, as a mildly successful freelance writer, holed up in a borrowed cabin to pen a memoir about her trek of self-discovery. The book became an Oprah-stickered bestseller. The bestseller became a movie starring Reese Witherspoon.

"On my obituary, my own picture won't even be there," Strayed jokes to her audience. "It will be Reese Witherspoon." Wild the book, the movie and its collective fandom has become the woman. Now, Strayed, 46, must both accept and choose how this phenomenon will define her career going forward. If she wants, she could surely ride the wave of her bestseller for years to come. The audience has come to see the woman whose story they know so intimately but they seem to love her because they see their own stories in hers: losing parents, surviving abuse, living through divorces, freeing themselves from addictions.

In emails and letters, and at events such as these, they tell her how bizarre it is "how much they have in common." "What's interesting is if not so bizarre," Strayed tells the crowd. "We all essentially love the same way, we suffer the same way, we struggle the same way." Heads nod all around the auditorium at this, as they do throughout the evening, whenever Strayed a blond, broad-shouldered woman with a serene smile and confident presence utters a piece of wisdom like this, or in fact pretty much to delight a new batch of children with his latest book Dennis Lee is sure ANNA FITZPATRICK FOR NATIONAL POST. Dennis Lee's memorable rhymes are enough to capture the attention of a room full of wriggly toddlers. He celebrated the release of his latest poetry collection, Melvis and Elvis, at Totsapalooza, an annual energetic celebration of children's literature organized by the nonprofit group Small Print Toronto. When Lee first took the stage to read, many of his tiny audience members were distracted with other stimuli, paying no attention to the man with white hair at the front of the room.

Yet like a snowball rolling down a hill, picking up more snow as it goes, his reading drew in more and more kids, until nearly everyone had spun around to listen. Soon it became an interactive event complete with call and response. Reading from a newer poem, When I Woke Up, Lee chanted, "I felt so fine at breakfast time I drank some apple to a room full of high-pitched voices shouting "Juice!" in response. FOR KIDS Melvis and BERNIE COEDHART My first encounter with Dennis Lee's rhythmic verse for children took place in the late 1970s, when Son One was a toddler enrolled in a Tumbling Turtles class at the YWCA in Edmonton. The instructor got kids into the spirit of things with lively songs and poems, including Alligator Pie, and by the time the class had run its course, Lee's words were firmly embedded in my brain.

To this day, I have no trouble conjuring up the opening lines: "Alligator Pie, alligator pie, If I don't get some I think I'm gonna die. Give away the green grass, give away the sky, But don't give away my alligator pie." Sons One and Two are beyond the target ages of Lee's rhymes now, but his books and the lyrics he wrote for Jim Henson's Frag-gle Rock television series were an integral part of their youth. And there is comfort in the fact that the Canadian poet continues to write for children, long after his own offspring (two daughters and a son) have grown to adulthood. Melvis and Elvis (HarperCollins, 36 pages, his latest collection of juvenile verse, has just been published and the classic poem Alligator Pie (HarperCollins, 12 double-page 1 tures, provided by illustrator Frank Newfeld.) Lee has published dozens of children's books since, including 1977's Garbage Delight, though Alligator Pie has remained his best known. The influence of Alligator Pie outside of critical circles is not lost on Lee.

He recalls an outing in north Toronto, where he'd gone for a walk that took him alongside a public school. A fence separated Lee from the school, but he could hear the sounds of the children playing on the other side. A group of girls, likely skipping rope, began chanting Alligator Pie to keep the rhythm. "They had no idea that I was on the other side of the fence, and they wouldn't have recognized me even if they knew the name of the guy who wrote it," he says. "That was lovely.

I liked that very much," Lee says. "The poem had its own life. They weren't worried about who wrote it. "That just felt comfortable to me, that the work was out there in the world. The writer was less important than the poetry." rhymes these days.

But his new book shows he hasn't lost his touch when it comes to creating memorable rhymes for kids two to 10 years old. Illustrated by Vancouver's Jeremy Tankard (best known for his book Grumpy Bird), the new volume opens with a lengthy introductory poem about the two main characters and their love of reading. Melvis is a female monster, depicted by Tankard as a large green creature with claws and rabbity ears; Elvis is a male elf. Each is searching fruitlessly for books about the other, only to suddenly realize that right here in the library are the real things: a monster and an elf who help each other find the books they want, and then go on to discover the joys of poetry and friendship. What follows is a variety of poems that use the devices Dennis Lee has employed in his children's books for decades: lots of humour, the occasional bit of wistfulness and sadness, plenty of tongue-in-cheek irreverence, and great rhymes that stay with the reader (and listener).

Lee plays with language and periodically works in place names, most of them Ontario-based. Chances are, this book will win over a whole new generation of young people. It has been more than a decade since Lee's last book for children. I fervently hope that I'm reading too much into one of the closing poems in this new volume A Song for Mister Lee, which ends with a farewell and that Melvis and Elvis will not be the last. My feet went around the pedals of the bike, and I started hearing these nutty words.

Alligator Pie he says, enunciating each syllable like a chant. "It didn't make any sense to me and I thought, 'I just wish this would just go "I kept getting more words so I turned the bike around and went back to where we were living, scuttled down the bits and pieces that had come into my head, and thought, 'Well, that's out of my head now, I can forget about Lee's daughters were the first audience for Alligator Pie. Unlike Mother Goose, Lee's poems didn't come with pictures a matter the girls complained about to their father. But the silly words were enough to keep their attention. They didn't differentiate between the poems their father wrote and the poems they heard from books.

To them, a story was a story. Soon, he had a collection of children's poems. He published Alligator Pie, the collection, with Macmillan Publishing in 1974. (The poems now had pic times with Dennis Lmm 0J3 iU a picture book illustrated by Montreal's Marie-Louise Gay, which was published in 1984. Not to mention all those lyrics for Fraggle Rock, from 1983 to 1987.

And readings. Lee did numerous readings for the younger set. I have vivid memories of attending one at the Village Bookshop, a small hole-in-the-wall bookshop in a strip mall in Edmonton one of the earliest specialty children's bookstores in Canada. The owner, Dianne Woodman, had clearly underestimated Lee's drawing power because children turned out in such numbers that it was difficult to place the poet where everyone could see him. Woodman, ever resourceful, solved the problem by dragging in a stepladder, positioning it in the middle of the store, and perching the poet on top with his book.

The kids were packed in around the ladder and he read from this vaulted position with great enthusiasm. If doubtful that Lee, now 75, would be asked to do a reading from such a precarious position 2 Melvis and Elvis, from HarperCollins, is about a monster (thaf Melvis) and an elf (that's well, you know). The two start off as strangers, both browsing the library at the same time in search of the perfect book to read. As a child, Lee discoveredhis own love of reading The Wind in the Willows and Winnie the Pooh were some of his first favourite books. Lee nonetheless began his poetry career writing for an adult audience with poems about driving on the highway, or the intimacy of quarrelling, or of taking out the garbage.

From the beginning he's done quite well for himself he won the Governor General's Award in 1972 for his book Civil Elegies. As Lee started a family, he found himself reading to his two young daughters every night, tucking them into bed with a story or a verse. "I started writingwhen the older one was beginning to enjoy Mother Goose at bedtime, at two years old or so," Lee says. "I wrote Alligator Pie one day riding on a bike right where we lived. Elvis: Good spreads, $12.99) was released last fall in an appropriately sturdy board-book format for the very young, with illustrations by Calgary's Sandy Nichols.

Lee never set out to be a poet laureate for the younger "set. His writings were aimed at adults; Civil Elegies and Other Poems earned him the Governor General's Literary Award (English language, for poetry or drama) in 1972, and Riffs, his 1993 collection, returns to print this month from Brick Books. But Wiggle to the Laundromat, a collection of poems he had written for his own children and which Canadian artist Charles Pachter illustrated with highly sophisticated black-and-white images, appeared in print in an oversized volume in 1970. It included Alligator Pie, a poem 1 that proved so memorable that it reappeared four years later in an eponymously titled collection for kids, illustrated by Frank Newfeld. There was no stopping Lee in the 1970s and '80s; he published a second collection, Nicholas Knock Other People, the same year as Alligator Pie, followed by Garbage Delight in 1977.

Jelly Belly, illustrated by Juan Wijn-gard, was published in 1983, and The Ice Cream Store, with art by American illustrator David McPhail, appeared in 1999, followed a year later by Bubblegum Delicious. Throughout those years, Lee also contributed juvenile verse to various international anthologies and he wrote the rhyming text for Lizzy's Lion, any time she opens her mouth. Brushing off Strayed as a cog in the emotional beach-read industry would be ignoring the deep influence her work has had on many women, from small victories to entire life reversals. With every self -deprecating cuss word, every charming Witherspoon anecdote, every "You guys know what that's like, right?" Strayed affirms their trust. She strongly feels that it's about time to scale back, though.

"My whole thingright now is saying no," Strayed says in an interview before her speech. "Kind of my old me hasn't caught up with my new me yet. I need to be able to say, yeah, I'm thrilled Wild was so well received, but now I need to move on to the next thing." Until Wild, the challenge was finding the time and money to survive as a writer. Now she has an abundance of both. The borrowed cabin where she wrote her book has been replaced by a cabin of her own, just 15 minutes away from the Pacific Crest Trail.

And just this week, she finished renovating the attic of her Portland home. It is her very first writing office. The challenge now is what to do with it. A Reese Witherspoon plays Cheryl Strayed, author of the memoir Wild, in the movie version, getty IMAGES FILES.