Gracie in Norway

This is my current favorite picture of Gracie, my 14-year-old daughter. One of her backpacking girrrrls must have snapped it in July, Gracie unaware, while they were trekking in Norway.

Gracie has not shown me this picture. I found it on her blog.

Some of Gracie's classmates' parents tell me they do not allow their daughters to blog. They are worried about cyberviolence. These same parents think I am nuts to have let my daughter travel out of the country to go backpacking at the age of 14; they also worry about terrorism.

Not I. I am more concerned that my daughter will not find her voice.

I read Laurie Halse Anderson's SPEAK when Gracie was in sixth grade. Her sixth grade teacher freaked out and called me when she realized that Gracie had chosen it as her "realistic novel." She advised me to read it before my daughter did. So I did. I won't ruin it by explaining why, but the protagonist spends most of her freshman year of high school in silence.

Now my daughter is a High School Freshman. She has not yet found her voice in writing. This is for a variety of complex reasons, and I will not go into them right now. So I work at helping her travel to wherever she can get on this earth. I hope for her to experience the world, and write about it wherever she will, and however she must. For real terrorism happens to girls when they are gagged and bound by the rules of what they may not say, or by what scripts they are forced to memorize and repeat .