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Alumna author Delia Sherman speaks at MS News
By Andrew Seguin
 Delia Sherman ’69 is a writer. She wanted to be an opera singer at one point, but stage fright kept her voice from ever reaching audiences in arias, instead preserving it for the lucid delivery of the fiction that she writes. Delia Sherman is not a realistic writer, which she readily admits. She stood in front of the Middle School at News last week and said, “I am here to tell you there may be fairies in Central Park but I’ve never seen one.” Creating belief in something without proof of it is what great fiction accomplishes, and Ms. Sherman spoke candidly to the students about trying to achieve that goal.
Ms. Sherman began by reading two anecdotes that she had specially penned for the occasion. The first was a straightforward, first person account of what she remembered about Middle School News as a student at Chapin. She remembered that each girl had to speak at News, maybe for three minutes, but it could have been two or four, and she wasn’t certain what she talked about. The second story was fictional and told in the third person. It was based on Ms. Sherman’s experience at News, but it wasn’t about her — at least not literally. The story was about a girl named Miranda who is nervous about giving a presentation at News, so much so that “Her knees felt like spaghetti, her mouth felt like it was lined with felt, and her brain felt it liked it had been pulled out through her nose,” Ms. Sherman read. But Miranda ends up delighting the audience with her knowledge of canopic jars and the Egyptian Book of the Dead, much in the same way that Ms. Sherman delighted the Middle School with her descriptions of the scene.
The two anecdotes displayed how adept Ms. Sherman is at using elements of reality to construct an imaginary world, a skill that was also evident in the excerpt she read from her novel Changeling, which follows a young girl named Neef on a quest for impossible objects. She read a scene about an encounter between Neef and a mermaid queen who lives beneath New York harbor, which left many girls in the audience whispering to their neighbor, “I want that book.” Ms. Sherman appeared at Chapin’s Book Fair, so students had no trouble finding Changeling at Chapin.
Questions about if there would be a sequel to Changeling and how long it took to write it were on the student’s minds, but so were more probing questions that addressed the often mysterious act of writing as well as its nuts and bolts, such as choosing names and creating characters. Ms. Sherman remarked that “Making characters is like going to a Chinese restaurant,” in that a writer must take a little bit of everything in order to be satisfied. She has to see the faces of her characters before she can write about them, so she chooses the face of someone on the street or in a café of to be the face of her character. Only then can she get down to the business of writing and turn that real face into a fictional heroine.
Delia Sherman is a real writer. There may not be fairies in Central Park, but she could make us believe in them.
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