“Everyone was befuddled,” she said upon publication of her resulting 2009 novel “Return to Sender.” “That’s where a storyteller says, ‘We need a story.’”
But after the subsequent deaths of her parents and sister, “I didn’t want to be reading or writing,” says the recently retired Middlebury College writer in residence. Instead, all she could do was wonder about a query whispering in her mind.
“Where Do They Go?” would become the title of Alvarez’s newest work — a children’s book addressing the emotional effects of death. It is illustrated by a fellow Vermont artistic legend, Windsor County printmaker Sabra Field.
“It struck me that the older you get, the less answers you have,” Alvarez says. “When you lose someone, we’re like children again. Grief returns you to that helplessness and openness.”
That’s why the text is a simple poem of questions presented alongside Field’s equally elemental woodblock pictures.
“When somebody dies, where do they go?” the book begins. “Who can I ask? Does anyone know? Do they go where the wind goes when it blows? Do they fall with the rain from the sky? Are they my tears when I cry?”
Field, who has created everything from an annual Vermont Life calendar to a U.S. Postal Service stamp that sold more than 60 million copies, had other inquiries upon receiving the manuscript.
“How do you draw the wind?” the artist wondered before settling on an upsweep of autumn leaves.
Alvarez, grieving the loss of her sister, first thought of Field as a collaborator when she pondered a past set of prints the artist created depicting the life-and-death myth of the Greek goddess Demeter and her daughter, Persephone. And so when the author was asked whom she wanted to illustrate her book, she replied either the late Spanish master Francisco Goya (who died in 1828) or Field.
“Sabra has put the Vermont landscape in our imaginations,” Alvarez says. “God is copying Sabra.”
The artist has equally good words for the author.
“I received perfection,” Field says of Alvarez’s poem. “But the real hero here is our agent. Can you imagine trying to get a publisher to release a death book for kids?”
Enter Triangle Square, an imprint of Seven Stories Press, publisher of Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.” Thanks to the company with the motto “Works of Radical Imagination,” Alvarez and Field are scheduled to share their 24-page hardcover Saturday at a free public program at 2 p.m. at The Residence at Otter Creek in Middlebury.
They hope the book — which includes faces of many colors and a Spanish-language edition titled “¿Donde va a parar?” — will appeal to readers of all ages.
Alvarez, who turns 67 on Monday, then will return to writing a new novel, while Field, who celebrates her 82nd birthday this year, will continue working on a mural and stained glass window. As their book concludes, they know one way to move on is by “loving the world” through remembering to live.
