Changing the World Together in 2025
This is the speech I used to give to Rotarians when they asked me for an inspiring speech versus straight-up public image training. I’ve tweaked it a bit.
I'm sharing it here because:
I think more than Rotarians should hear it.
I don't know how often I'll get to give it.
It's important to me and now that we’re heading into 2025, I’m going to start refocusing on things that are important to me.
Since 2007, I’ve traditionally published about 15 books, including an anti-bullying anthology, an internationally and NYT bestselling series, and medal-winners. I've learned a few things about story since then and I've learned a lot of things about people. One of the things I've learned is that:
Rotary and Doing Good and Writing Kids Books Have a Lot in Common.
Why?
Because they all require telling stories and they are using those stories to make a better world, to build connection and community.
So how did I get published? How does anyone get published? That's a big question people always ask. I quit my job as the editor of the Ellsworth Weekly (a local print paper), went to Vermont College to get a master’s degree, a year later submitted my first book to an editor I knew nothing about other than he seemed super cool, and got lucky.
But it's about more than that.
It’s about content, craft and contacts
Content is what you want to say
Craft is how well you say it
Contacts are the final step of getting it out there in the world. And everyone is hyper focused on that step, but it’s the least important one when it comes to writing. What matters when you’re making a good story on the page and in the real world is character, plot, theme, process, beginnings, middles and ends.
And that’s pretty much it. Have something to say. Work on saying it well. Send it out into the world. Cross your fingers.
But writing is truly bigger than that, and deeper than that and it reminds me a lot of Rotary International and also it reminds me a lot of just trying to be a good person in a world that might seem like it’s better to not be a good person.
The purpose of writing is to tell a story for motivation and engagement. It’s your purpose as a Rotarian and kind of just as a human.
You look into this world, the one we are living in now,
Beyond our walls, beyond our borders
Within our walls, within our borders
And you know that the incredible exists
Incredible hate
Incredible love.
Incredible need.
And we sit here, the creations of this world of love, this world of pain and hate, of guns and bombs, of poets and artists and Rotarians
And our hearts scream for goodness
And our brains long for logic
And ours and others bodies break and mend and break again.
We are the creation of the world of stories around us, a world of the incredible.
And our children are too.
And this leads to more questions and wonderings about both the people we work with and about ourselves
What does it mean to find story when you are the one who is oppressed?
What does it mean to find story when you are the one who is barely surviving in your own life?
When your mother cries to sleep every night because she can’t find a job, pay bills, fix the furnace.
What does it mean to find a story full of magic when you are dying for magic in your own life?
When your body doesn’t work the way other kids’ bodies work? When your body gets used in ways it is not supposed to be used?
When people make fun of your clothes, your sex, your gender, the way you say your s’s, the shade of your skin, the curl in your hair, your last name, your first name, the way you see letters backwards, the way you see or don’t see at all, the way you learn, the way you love?
What does it mean when there are these stories out there – these magical truths – these enchanted people and places when you are just barely managing to survive?
It means there are tiny life lines.
It means there are little pieces of help.
That’s what Rotary’s story is and that is what children’s books are about. And that is what, I would argue, everyone should make their lives about.
Story is powerful. We’ve know that for forever.
Books are burned and banned because people fear them.
Books are powerful because they are (as Ben Howard sings) information wrapped up in empathy, they are reflections of our world as it is, how it was and how it should be.
And people fear that.
The world of fantasy is a world within books and without and the evil creatures that kids meet in these books?
The only difference for some of them?
The only difference is one is on the page and one is in their house.
The only difference is one is in a book and one is in their street, their church, their classroom, their playground.
Monsters and heroes are everywhere. Fantasy novels just make those monsters and heroes bigger, the stakes seem higher when you are fighting a dark wizard or the god of war.
Books and Rotary offers hope. They show us that there are other ways of living. There are lives and worlds greater than our own and if these lives can imagined, what does it mean about our own lives? It means we can reimagine our lives, too.
MY DAD
My father was the truck driving son of a communist stock broker.
As a toddler, my father stood on the streets of Staten Island passing out political pamphlets that he couldn’t muddle through. People spat on him for views he could not even read. They threw his pamphlets in puddles, in horse excrement in his face.
He never made it past fourth grade.
He was the smartest man I ever knew.
He could read people’s souls, understand their stories, their sorrows and explain to you about quantum mechanics.
But he thought he was dumb.
All his life.
Because he couldn’t read.
Sometimes, I get so sad because I think of all the things he could have become if he could read a bit better. But more than that, I get so sad because of how not being a good reader hurt his heart.
Knowledge Empowers Us to Want to Help
That knowledge only makes me want to work harder for all the kids I write for. I want them to have the ability and story that my dad didn’t get to enjoy
And that knowledge, I know, does the same to you.
The thing about Rotarians and writers is that we can’t be “contained.”
We have to sing out our stories, sing out our advocacy, give voice to the powerless, because our hearts … our hearts won’t let us be quiet.
We are the people who protect the enchanted, until they can protect themselves.
We are the ones who say – You are the girl in the story who will one day save this world. We say - you are the boy who will rid us of the monster beneath the bed.
It’s our responsibility. We must lift as we climb. We must lift as we teach. We must lift as we write and as we live and as we flip pancakes.
It doesn’t always happen that way
I was in the 7th grade, when a teacher told me,
“Carrie, you will never become anything with those s’s. Nobody will ever take you seriously because of those s’s. Nobody will ever hire. Nor love a girl who sounds like you.”
He made me afraid of my own voice.
He took away my heart. He took away my story.
A writer’s job and a person’s job is to build worlds for children that reflect possibility and magic. We are to make the best worlds we possibly can, piece by piece, word by word, symbol by symbol.
We are to put our souls in them. So that the kids can grab on and soar. If the boy wizard can survive. So can I. If the girl can stop time. So can I.
So can I.
Kids need to know that there is darkness around them, that this world is incredible, but that they are enchanted. That they can overcome what they need to overcome. That they can not only survive, but that they can light up the world with their magic.
So can I.
So can they.
So can you.
Stories create potential outcomes.
We have to expand worlds, not shrink them. We have to include and empower. We have to open our mind and our hearts as writers and teachers so that there are possibilities and hope.
Let me tell you why I am a writer. I write because I want to make connections. I write to try to understand the world and help kids or adults understand it too.
The Marathon
I went to the Boston Marathon to cheer on my friend Lori who was running to raise money to fight cancer the year of the bomb. I walked and set up for taking pictures. I didn’t expect to see Lori for an hour, so I hung out with some people from New Jersey, talked to some cops. I took some pictures and kept wondering if I should walk the rest of the route to get ready for when Lori crossed the finish line. Logically, I knew I should, but my gut kept me back. One of my friends called, and as we talked the first explosion went off.
“What was that?” he said.
“That was bad,” I answered. “It was an explosion. It was absolutely an explosion.”
Then the second explosion happened. And I hung up. And I looked at the cops. And the cops both lifted up their portable radios to their ears. That was not a good sign. Then they began to run towards the finish line along a parallel road. That was a worse sign, especially since one of the cops looked like he never ran. Ever.
I followed them. It smelled of smoke. It smelled of fear and confusion. Cops and medics and volunteers swarmed the area. Blood pooled on clothing and the ground. Debris was everywhere. People were crying and hysterical. The police turned me around.
So, I turned around. I regret that now. I don’t know how I could have helped. I am not a trained emergency medical technician. I regret that, too.
So, I went back to where I had been taking pictures. Runners were wandering around still, confused, cold. They had a combination of runner’s fatigue and shock. Shivering and stunned, they were desperately trying to contact family members. Some walked in circles because they didn’t know how not to keep moving, but they also didn’t know where to go. They had spent 25 miles moving forward, towards this one destination called the finish line and now they were stuck, aimless. Their ultimate goal was suddenly gone, devastated by two bombs. Those of us who were there to watch, gave them our cell phones so they could call family members who were waiting for them. They were waiting for them right by the bombs. We gave the runners money so they could get on the T when it worked again. We gave them our coats.
“How will I give it back to you?” one runner asked as she shrugged on a dark green fleece.
“You don’t need to. You never need to,” a man next to me told her.
“I have to,” she murmured. “I have to.”
I gave away my coat. I passed around my phone.
One woman said, “Please tell me it wasn’t the subway. My kids are on the subway.”
“It wasn’t the subway,” I tell her. “It was the finish line.”
She cocked her head. “What? No? How?”
That was the question: How? We knew by then that it was probably a bomb, and the hows of making a bomb are easy, but the ‘how could you’ is a harder question.
“How?” she kept saying. “How?”
And then the police moved the runners out, they told us, the watchers, to go. So, we left, a massive exodus toward the bridge and Massachusetts Avenue. People were still sobbing. A man on a corner was reading from Boston.com on his iPhone trying to find out exactly what happened. People stood around him, strangers listening to him say the words, “explosions… injuries…”
Three girls were crying, young and scared and broken inside.
“They are so hurt. They hurt them. They are so hurt,” one girl kept repeating. We kept walking.
As I walked across the bridge, a woman on the phone sobbed to her friend, “It was so big. The explosion was so big. I dropped everything in my hands. I dropped my lens cap. I dropped my purse. I dropped it all. I called my sister. I called my friend. I called everyone. I just need to talk to someone. I feel so alone. It was awful. People were missing their legs. It was awful.”
And then she saw me, this talking woman, and I nodded at her and I grabbed her hand and squeezed it. She squeezed back. We kept walking.
A leather-jacket guy next to me was telling another guy in plaid that he had no way home. I gave him my cell. We kept walking.
As I was feeling thankful, a man in front of me went down on his knees on the sidewalk. It looked like he was praying, but he was really sobbing. We all stopped walking. People pet his back. People murmured things. He stood up and we kept walking again. We walked and walked and gradually the crowd thinned, and gradually the sobs lessened.
Life is about connections.
As writers, we know that we have to connect with our readers. We have to make them care about the characters’ stories.
And Rotary was built on that need for connection and the need to do good together.
But the question is, how do we make those connections, those positive connections? Talking about Polio (which Rotary was instrumental in stopping) isn't going to work for everyone.
We make connections by embracing and protecting the enchanted. We do it by taking chances, by caring, by looking into the eyes of our readers or the people we’re giving wheelchairs to and seeing that spark, that magic, that hope that is there despite this world of the incredible. We do it by giving someone a phone to use, a sweatshirt to wear, an ear on a Massachusetts street as they sob.
We do it by giving ourselves to other Rotarians, readers, people we’re helping, over and over again and expecting nothing in return.
But we always get something in return. We get connections.
It’s because of those connections and hope that I was a Rotarian and why I am a writer and now a reporter again. It is the only reason that I don’t quit writing.
REMEMBER THOSE THREE WORDS?
Content is what you want to say. What is it that you want to say to this world? What is it that you want to share?
Craft is how well you say it. How do you want to share your message? How can you get better at it?
Contacts are the final step of getting it out there in the world.
It’s that fourth word—connections—that really matters because that is the goal: to connect.
Our job is to tell the stories, make the stories, protect the Enchanted and realize that the Enchanted our sometimes ourselves. We being to protect people when we connect with them and we can't give up.
Why?
We can’t give up because the world needs good stories when all it hears is bad. That’s my goal for 2025: to try to tell better stories, to tell them better, and to remember why I write at all, to become truer to myself and my motivation.
Don’t give up, okay?
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Wow Carrie! You have such talent!