Jeannine Atkins

My children’s literature class discussed One Hundred Dresses, a chapter book by Eleanor Estes and illustrated by Louis Slobodkin, who I learned was an elevator operator before making his name as an artist, and sometimes let the door get stuck between floors to get in some reading time.

I liked this book when I read it along with my daughter when she was eight, and I liked it rereading it for class. But some of my students made me give it a sharper look. When I asked if anyone would want to change the end, two hands shot up. Fast. The mean girls, they felt, were let off the hook too easily. Reesha was most articulate about the lack of justice, and how the short novel trivialized forgiveness and dismissed the complications and wonder of real friendship. There should have been confrontation. At the very least, Fran said, Peggy should have heard someone say: I don’t like you.

Althea brought out the way Wanda, the girl who’s teased, is written about only in the past tense, as a figment of memory, and thus becomes a shadow character: is that itself a putdown? We discussed morals and peer pressure and how they enter books for young readers. I mentioned an observation from my daughter’s first grade teacher years ago, who studied the dynamics of popularity among girls and concluded that a lot came down to what they wore in their hair. She could observe the tops of heads and often figure out who was bent on coming out on top. This statement seemed to strike a chord. Many memories of barrettes and hair ties and bands came flooding out into this female dominated room.

This might be a good writing exercise: memories of pony tail holders and butterfly clips, hierarchy and power and envy. Go for it, if you want! What did you want to wear in your hair when you were six or eight?

In my last post I noted that Wheaton College in Illinois has the wardrobe that belonged to C.S. Lewis. And they do. Here's a picture:



But I just read that another Christian college, Westmont, in Santa Barbara, CA also has a wardrobe that belonged to the author of The Chronicles of Narnia. The one at Wheaton College was made by C.S.Lewis's grandfather and is the wardrobe that he and his brother played in as boys. Naturally, there's a bit of controversy you can read about here and elsewhere http://blog.syracuse.com/shelflife/2007/03/the_real_wardrobe.html

Update. I just got this information from a kind person: "Westmont's wardrobe is not on campus as it is touring with the Narnia Exhibition (http://www.narniaexhibition.com/) which is leaving Arizona and will be in Philadelphia in November. Here are some pictures of the exhibit: http://www.westmont.edu/_public_affairs/press_kit/wardrobe_exhibit.html"

Philadelphia in November! Anyone want to meet me? Here's the picture of the wardrobe from Westmont.
I think it’s cool that apparently both colleges display them with fur coats stuffed inside.

I think there’s better food in Narnia than Turkish Delight. Just go the cave of the faun, Mr. Tumnus, for toast with honey and boiled brown eggs. Or to Mrs. Beaver’s snug home for orange marmalade rolls fresh from her little oven. C. S. Lewis isn’t stingy with his food description, and when asked if he put this in children’s books because he couldn’t write about grown up sex, he said, no, he put it in because he likes food. Anyway, it’s the Turkish Delight that Edmund loves perhaps more than his siblings at one point and causes his all important downfall, and people want to know what is is. Jello-like, often rose flavored, sticky, slightly slimy.

But why should they take my word for it? I found a recipe for Turkish Delight, but it involved a candy thermometer, which I don’t have, and the idea of standing over a hot stove stirring something I’d be pretty sure would end up disgusting didn’t appeal to me. I ordered some off the web and brought it in. One student said the Turkish Delight was like gourmet gummy bears. Which sounds better than my description.



We read Lewis’s essay “Three Ways of Writing for Children.” The one bad way is to write to impart a message to inferior beings. The second way is to write with a specific child in mind, the way Tolkien began The Hobbit for his children, or Lewis Carroll started his classic as a story for his neighbor, Alice, or Beatrix Potter began Peter Rabbit as a tale for her former governess’s ill boy. The third way is his, and that’s to write what he calls a fairy tale because that’s the only tale he can tell, coming partly from the child in him still and from the grownup.

He also mentions how his writing begins in pictures. I’ve read elsewhere about how he and his brother used to play in a wardrobe when they were children in Ireland. At age sixteen, Lewis had a dream about a faun holding an umbrella in a snowy forest. As an adult, Lewis began a story called “The Lion,” which fizzled out. During WWII, some children escaping the bombing in London took refuge in his big old house, and the pieces started to come together. Eight years after he penned the first page, he had the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

I told my students that Lewis’s original wardrobe is now in a collection at Wheaton College in Illinois.
“Oh, can you go in it?” one asked.
“Um, I’m not sure. I guess you’d have to research."
But I don’t think she will. And neither will I. It’s nicer to think that maybe you can climb in.

A few days ago I told my nineteen-year-old daughter that I was going with friends to see Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. There was a pause before Em said, “Isn’t that a little young for you?”

I thought it was kind of sweet she didn’t phrase it as: aren’t you old for that?

I recently heard Carol Christ, the president of Smith College, speak about fantasy in nineteenth century literature for children. She called Alice in Wonderland her favorite children’s book, in part because of the way it speaks to both adults and children. She mentioned the rabbit hole as perhaps symbolizing the regression of adults, going back into the womb. Hmm. I’m more apt to think about how we wind our ways around words or add layers as we read books we read as children and find more than we first did. It’s not about going back in search of lost boys or lost worlds, but maybe realizing those people and places have been with us all along.

Or something. Sorry. I just mean to say that regression isn’t a word I care to use, and that things are more complicated than moving back or moving forward, and that we may never completely peel away all the people we’ve ever been. It’s why fairy tales stick with us, and why we find more in them as years pass. We don’t have to move beyond, but just let things accrue. I told my students who are studying picture books about my just-hit-up-the-candy-store feeling, part guilt, more elation, the first time I checked out library books not intended for my child, but for me. Yes, you can find pretty or funny pictures even in the stacks of college libraries, which not only have a cataloguing system that’s more complicated than the Dewey Decimal most library-lovers grew up with, but have the jackets removed from books, almost as if to keep the stacks less colorful and shiny.

“There should therefore be a time in adult life devoted to revisiting the most important books of our youth. Even if the books have remained the same,… we have most certainly changed, and our encounter with them will be a new thing.” -- Italo Calvino, The Use of Literature

And C. S. Lewis, wrote, “When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly.” (“On Three Ways of Writing for Children)

The idea of growing up suggests a movement toward a better state. Yes, in some ways, but not entirely. It’s good to read books written for young people and good to hang out with them. I like walking with my contemporary, Mary, as we discuss political campaigns, cholesterol, and calcium, for instance, but yesterday I had fun walking with my thirteen-year-old neighbor, hearing her philosophy on squirrel chasing dogs – they can’t help it, it’s like a video game to them. And did I know anyone who might want some chickens she needs to get rid of? They’re past laying eggs but make nice easy pets, and she has 28, a lot to get in each night. When our dog leashes crossed, instead of passing over the leads as Mary and I do, G. leapt over them, without a break in the conversation.

Nasty rumors of snow in Vermont -- mnn, thanks, Jo! jbknowles) Fall colors are fleeting, and I’m trying to store them in as much as possible. Walking while I can walk without slipping on ice or trudging through snow. Our little town doesn’t have much in the way of attractions, but it does have a lot of trees. A few days ago a car passed going along at about 20 mph, with a guy sticking out his arm, camera in hand.

Hey! It’s all right to park and get out and look!

Maybe even listen. P.L. Travers, the creator of Mary Poppins, remembered being a child who believed trees talked to each other but fell silent when she stepped into the forest. Her strategy: “Be still long enough, I thought, and the trees would take no notice of me and continue whatever it was they were doing or saying before I happened upon them.”

I vaguely remember being a child reading some already faded books by Thornton W. Burgess. His stories were filled with characters like Mother West Wind, Mrs. Grouse, Mr. Snake, Jack Squirrel, Hooty the Owl, and Grandfather Frog. Recently a friend brought up this author, and said she thought his work had gone out of fashion because of their use of talking animals who wear human clothes. I said that anthropomorphism is not out of fashion, except maybe with “your people,” meaning conservationists, which wasn’t a very nice phrase and took no account of all the trees, frogs, vernal pools etc. my dear friend has saved in her day (not to mention all the treats she gives my dogs and advice she gives me).

I just meant that everyone, even naturalists, have got to check our vigilante leanings. You could wipe out a whole lot of literature if you nixed animals who talk. I wouldn’t want to do without best friends Frog and Toad, or Toot and Puddle, or Jane Dyer’s sweet works, the hungry, hungry caterpillar, Winnie-the-Pooh, Thoreau as a bear and a pigeon who wants to drive a school bus. Beatrix Potter’s work seems timeless. I’m fond of Kevin Henke’s little mouse Lily, and Angelina Ballerina, not so much of Ian Falconer’s Olivia. As the saying goes, whether or not we want talking animals in a book depends on what they say.

Anthropomorphism has its benefits: you don’t have to necessarily distinguish the gender, though many artists do; race isn’t an issue, so children of all colors can identify with the characters; age isn’t important, so pigs, hippos, etc. get to do both childlike and adult things without raising eyebrows. In his autobiography, Burgess adds another reason. “The animal story, because of the psychological factor involve, the intuitive feeling of superiority on the part of the child, is the most effective form of story.” (Now I Remember, p. 337) So is it that children feel a bit above some of the foolishness they find in humanized animal?

What matters is that anthropomorphism be done well, and I went back to Burgess to see. The adventures seemed generally ho hum, the lessons stagy. It’s not the talking animals that let Burgess’s books go out of print, after a long life most of us would envy, but that their dialogue isn’t quite distinctive enough, and perhaps even their animal nature not animal-y enough. I’m afraid I found the stories about as goofy or run-of-the-mill as the names of the characters (except for Mother West Wind, I’m holding her dear).

The flat prose is not altogether surprising considering that Burgess wrote over 70 books and 15,000 stories. Just in case anyone out there was feeling prolific. He wrote six stories a week for a newspaper at one point in his life. He said he often knocked out a story in half an hour, dictating to a secretary, and that he never rewrote. He gives us a formula: “One fact, a liberal amount of imagination with truth, a moral lesson, plenty of good action, adventure or lively dialogue, humor or pathos as desired, sometimes both, and a reasonable amount of simple English.” (p.218)

He doesn’t claim they were grand art, though he is pretty proud and hastens to list admirers including Teddy Roosevelt. I’d say the stories have had their day, but it’s kind of nice that many are still available on the shelves of my local library, with pages bent and yellowed. I think what I like best is their setting – not remarkable, but speaking of an era, or to children who still, plain old play in the woods. Most of us who write about nature in any kind of way for children hope to inspire wonder before endangered planet themes. What I like in Burgess is that he takes a step back even more. Nature is there, but also silliness and magic. I think his stories appealed to children like me who made little porches on stones and thrones on moss, where the woods were part of a kingdom where real squirrels play with elves and fairy queens.

In a recent class called Dean’s Book, we talked about a novel that not everyone loved totally, but everyone loved enough, and felt it made them think and sometimes laugh and sometimes cry. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is an acclaimed novel for adults by Joanathan Safran Foer, which alternates the points of view of a nine-year-old whose father died in 9/11 and that of a survivor of the bombing of Dresden in WWII. The nine-year-old is precocious, funny, one of a kind, as well as grief stricken. He obsesses about things to invent for safety, such as buildings that can descend into the earth or a birdseed shirt so that birds would flock to you and carry you safely away. Oscar is loveable, as are other more minor characters, like a woman who’s lived for years near the top of the Empire State Building, which she loves so much that she’s become an archive of its facts. Foer can write ten intriguing characters on one page and is amazing in the way her captures the boy’s voice. I think he gets it right when Oscar pulls the “my father died” on strangers to get attention and pity, but this doesn’t take away from his deep and true grief.

We discussed one student’s sense that the author was hiding behind the young main character, and the student’s statement that putting pictures of a man falling from a Tower was completely out of line. Other students said why they thought that was necessary to the hopeful ending. We debated which if any of the 45 pictures were necessary, and I agreed with those who thought not totally, but they added to the way the book made you go back, rather than reading straight through; sometimes this left me feeling a bit fragmented, which seemed part of the point. After one student made some statements about the book, I observed, “There seem to be some contradictions in what you said.”

He grinned and said, "Yeah. And wait till you read my paper. It's full of them."

And it was. Wonderfully. You can’t tidily sum up a great book. I’d urge anyone to read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, but there were a few places that made me think of my post last month about the hazards of going on too long with sentences, dialogue, and chapters. I found a few times that just a sentence or two or even a word too many took me out of this carefully crafted and engaging world, spun things briefly false or sentimental. The old man who won’t speak, who has tattooed yes and no on his hands and carries a notebook, grips me until we overhear him think about his motives, which jar with a hint of psycho-babble. He wouldn’t think that! I thought, or at least I was wishing he wouldn’t. It’s okay to avoid someone you love from fear of loss but could you please not point that out? Did we need a mini lecture on how good it is to tell someone you love them? No, when much of the novel is about longing and misses and we feel the pinch. We’ve had birdseed shirts! We don’t need the abstract nouns.

But I don’t know, maybe the sudden slants to the sentiment, and spelling themes out, are what helped make this novel a bestseller. Maybe it works for others, but I feel a bit shut out by the brief exposition. I say, Cut the thread! Tie a knot!

Among the many bloggers who seem to read books faster than I can get them to my tables, is Sarah Miller http://www.SarahMillerbooks.com author of Miss Spitfire: Reaching Helen Keller, a wonderful novel about the accomplished teacher, Annie Sullivan.

Right now, in between delving into Russian history and reviewing an array of books, Sarah raised a Disney challenge. http://sarahmillerbooks.blogspot.com/2008/07/disney-literature-challenge.html She’s compiled a list of fiction that inspired Disney films and hopes to read and comment on many.

In my children’s literature class, we’ve glanced at ways the Brothers Grimm shaped literature in the 1700s, Hans Christian Anderson in the 1800s, and Walt Disney the 1900s. We do read Anderson’s The Little Mermaid, most do go Ew about the ending, and we almost unanimously gave a thumbs up to Disney and Ashman and Menken who collaborated on many of The Little Mermaid’s charming lyrics and music. I’m a Disney fan, but I’m taking on a book I wish he hadn’t touched, T.H. White’s amazing The Once and Future King. The first part, The Sword in the Stone, led to the Disney animation, while the sexy and complicated adult lives of Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot inspired the musical Camelot and more Knights of the Roundtable lore.

Although the novel is about a boy, I’d say it’s more about society and politics than coming of age, and is not written for the very young. Animation turns what’s wry to slapstick. This Disney version doesn’t have redeeming music and also seems to lack much in the way of heroics. The book makes much of Arthur/aka Wart having no legal father, and that’s cleaned up in Disney, so his sense of disconnection makes little sense. T. H. White plays with Merlin as imperfect wizard, which is charming, but in Disney he seems overboardly inept and plain silly. Wart’s big confident foster-brother-rival is not nearly as funny as Gaston is in Beauty and the Beast.

What I remember most from Disney is Wart turning into various creatures in and above the moat, which is kind of cool, but the novel spends pages on each transformation and is breathtaking. The interaction between humans and animals is one between equals; in Disney, I’m afraid the respect gets washed out. In the book, Wart is easy to identify with in his complexity, yet you observe the makings of a ruler (somewhat against his will). I don’t remember much about the animation, but I had little impression of seeds for a future king in Wart. When he draws that sword from the stone, instead of feeling --ah, I knew he could! – it seems just a piece of magic, not the personal triumph, rich and conflicted, that it is in the novel.

Sarah gives good reasons to give Disney slack on using folklore – that’s it’s always been passed along and changed, and much of what we know has been translated as well. Some great images survive, but the language itself isn’t much. You can’t say this about some novels, and especially White’s, whose winding sentences and often ornate vocabulary is part of its pleasure. J.K. Rowling acknowledges this novel as one of her inspirations. It was just made into a book on CD – and once summer’s over, and my driving becomes more regular (the car is where I listen) I hope to check it out.

In the first lines of novels that people can quote by heart, right up there with “the best of times, the worst of times” is “’Christmas won’t be Christmas without presents,’ Jo grumbled.” And we know pretty soon that the absence in Little Women is not only about gifts, but the four sisters’ father, perhaps gone for the duration of the Civil War. Along with so many readers, I fell in love with the girls and their darling Marmee, and along with them, I worried: will Father ever come home?

I have to say I felt the longing for this moment more than I enjoyed the celebration, a pause amid more interesting stuff about dances, mean girls and pickled limes, and romances scribbled in a garret. But getting closer to an absent father can pull some characters to the end of a book. Trying to get to her ailing father shapes the plot of the recent and splendid first novel, Savvy, by Ingrid Law. Though Bambi may not be on a quest to find him, I love the moment when the fawn pulls to a fast stop, gazes at a strong stag, and says in his soft voice, “Father?” (I don’t know if this is how the moment is cast in Felix Salten’s book; Disney has a way of wrenching up the mother-father reunions and farewells). Then there are the unknown fathers who shape destinies that we see in a book like T.H. White’s The Sword and the Stone. Wart, known as a fatherless outsider, goes through all sorts of struggles before he can even begin to guess who his true father might have been.

These fathers aren’t sketched in such a way that we’d necessarily recognize them on the street. They’re no, say, Atticus Finch, Archibald Craven, or Mr. Mallard, McCloskey’s duck which my Massachusetts heart is fond of, though I know penguins, as depicted in several picture books, are better dads. But the tug toward an absent father, like an urge toward home, keeps us turning the pages. I’m not sure though that this pull is different from that toward a missing mother. Journeys to reach a mother are powerfully shown in Sharon Creech’s Walk Two Moons, P.D. Eastman’s Are You My Mother?, and Janell Cannon’s Stellaluna. “Where did our mother go?” is a question evaded and examined in various ways as a family of four children look for a haven in Cynthia Voigt’s Homecoming.

Okay, I’m off dads and onto moms, but does it matter? The absence of love and safety, whether depicted as father or mother, can carry us through a book. Is the gender of the hole important? I'd love to hear your thoughts here, or write them up in your own blog. Reflections on fathers in children’s literature can be sent by June 21 to http://blogcarnival.com/bc/cprof_209.html where Susan Taylor Brown susanwrites is collecting them for a carnival, or compilation of entries on the theme.

A student wrote a paper on E.B. White who I adore, and now I love his father, too. Apparently E.B. White had a wonderful childhood in the country, a doted-upon youngest child, but he struggled with depression through his life. After graduating from college, he took off with a college buddy to go cross country in a Ford Model-T. (which also happens to be the dream of the college senior who wrote this paper, though with different car.) E.B. White wrote a letter to his father, apologizing for his lack of ambition.

And do you know what this generous and imaginative dad wrote back?

“If you feel that you are lacking in ambition, be assured that meditation and contemplation, of which your letter is full, is a more certain joy in life. Anyone can indulge in ambition; only those who have the spirit can revel in passive enjoyment.”

I thought this was stunning. So did my student. Although I mentioned the letter to a friend, who is the parent of child heading into the world of work, and she said, “Yeah, that’s what he wrote. We don’t know what he also might have said.”

I suppose there could have been some kind of addendum, “Get a job, slacker.” But at least he had the grace to try to see his talented son for who he was, too.

As students recently came into class, one spoke of a contingent of Little Women fans who think Jo should have skated away after Amy fell through the ice of a frozen river. And then Jo could have married Laurie. “Anyway, Laurie turned into a drunk and died young, so it worked out, “ she said.

Okay, I know Amy burned Jo’s manuscript. Which may be as bad as falling into very cold water. But I don’t know, I never really embraced the whole Laurie-Jo thing, and I kind of liked Mr. Bhaer, even though I know Louisa May Alcott, annoyed that her editor insisted that Jo needed to be married off, didn’t go out of her way to make him especially fetching.

I’ve written about May, Louisa’s real sister, who was the inspiration for Amy (note the twisted around letters) and admire the woman. She longed to be an artist in a period when that was even harder than becoming a woman writer. She left Concord, Massachusetts to spend years in Paris, France. Like Amy, she loved to flirt, but she didn’t marry until she was in her late thirties, knowing that marriage and children would likely be the end to a career in art.

I say Yay to the fictional Jo for getting over that burnt manuscript (and yay for the copiers and back-ups of our day) and hauling her little sister out of the Concord River. Other votes?

I grew up reading The Moffat family series by Eleanor Estes, but read her Newbery Honor (1944) The Hundred Dresses first as an adult. It’s a slim book that I’d recommend to Jama Rattigan jamarattigan who’s celebrating April with cups of tea: here’s a book you can actually read over a cup, so put aside James’s Portrait of a Lady! The Hundred Dresses has tender illustrations by Louis Slobodkin, a sculptor who started illustrating children’s books after marrying a children’s book author. He was also friends with Estes, who grew up in a big family in West Haven, CT, cared for by a widowed mother. Eleanor Estes worked in libraries until tuberculosis forced her to stay home. She found time then to write and launched her career.

Her one child wrote an introduction to the more recent editions of The Hundred Dresses. She claims her mother’s inspiration for the book about class, guilt, forgiveness, and what we’d now call mean girls came from her life. A girl was teased, then left town before Eleanor ever had a chance to speak up for her. The Hundred Dresses is told mostly from the point of view of Maddie, a girl who keeps quiet during teasing, feeling her own precarious position. If she speaks up, will the other girls note her clothes are hand-me-downs, too? We see the social hierarchies that get set up within a school: Maddie notes that she’s poor, but at least she has a mother and kids can pronounce her last name, unlike Wanda’s. She tries using silence to feel safe.

The Hundred Dresses ends with questions. We’re not sure whether Wanda forgives or of the extent of the guilt of those who hurt her. Some students wished for a clearer declaration of right and wrong for readers to take away. Others argued that ambiguity is the lesson. How often do we wonder what became of others who may have been hurt by our words or silences? How often may our own unresolved guilt change us more than a lesson spelled out or a punishment from outside? And one student noted that the book says that seeking forgiveness is never too late. Isn’t that what the author did?

Here are a few sentences from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden that remind me it wasn’t published recently. We start the novel: “When Mary Lenox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle, everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too.” Wouldn’t most editors – the editor in me – want to tell the narrator to keep out, and if you must comment, be nice. “Disagreeable” is so subjective. But Mary goes on to be not only not pretty, but bossy and spoiled, and don’t we love to watch her have a bratty fit.

Another chapter begins: “One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live for ever and ever and ever.” The last phrase if often repeated, and in addition to this omniscient narrator’s mysticism, Colin often lectures on Magic, explaining how one can achieve this. Again that inner editor says: you can’t talk about eternal life, sweetheart. (And was it really okay to kill off the parents in the first few pages, with cholera, a really nasty disease?) Yet I love a book that takes such chances. I read on in some kind of awe, and think if we can get philosophical sidetracks in Moby Dick, War and Peace, and Middlemarch, why not in a book about children in a garden? I have some problems with the mother of Dickon and eleven, at last count, other children being so perpetually wise and cheery and energetic, but mostly I’m happy to listen to Susan Sowerby’s lectures, too. The world is an orange, she says, meant to be split and shared.

Point of view keeps shifting, in the way of bulky 19th century books, but the only place it bothers me is at the end, when Colin and his father bump Mary from the center. The book is about message as much as character. The metaphors don’t seem especially subtle. But The Secret Garden is one of my favorite books forever and ever and ever.

Am I so uncritical because this book came from another century? Or am I, and others, simply hungry for messages about self-determination and universal love that don’t always make it to the bookstores in contemporary novels?

I just read an essay in Alison Lurie’s collection Don’t Tell the Grownups, in which she comments that children’s book writers don’t necessarily write from happy childhoods or unhappy ones, but very often from happy childhoods that were suddenly broken. She mentions J. R.R. Tolkien’s loss of his father as a small child and his move from South Africa to England. His mother died when he was about twelve, as did C.S. Lewis’s mother. The grieving boy was sent off to boarding school, an experience Lewis said was worse than fighting in the first world war. After the death of his mother, Kenneth Grahame, author of The Wind in the Willows, was sent from Scotland to England to live with his grandparents. The river behind the house was his one pleasure. Like Tolkien, Frances Hogsden Burnett lost her father when young and she moved from one continent to another, in her case, from England to the U.S. For the rest of her life, Frances Hodgson Burnett moved between those countries, and her characters, too, are often displaced, looking for a home, or making one, as in a secret garden. Louisa May Alcott, who wrote so lovingly of one happy home, moved about sixteen times in the first sixteen years of her life. And closer to our time, Katherine Paterson spent early years in Asia, where her parents were missionaries, before coming to the United States.

This theory of brokenness shaping writers, like most theories, may have as many exceptions as rules. Lewis Carroll, for instance, joyfully grew up among lots of brothers and sisters, acting out in family plays and writing family newsletters, which were admired by a father who was crazy about nonsense. They stayed in one big comfortable house and nobody died too terribly before their time. Beatrix Potter spent most of her childhood in one house she rarely left. But whatever strength this broken-childhood theory has or doesn’t have, it nudges me to look for the roots of creativity in my own life.

When people ask me how I came to write for children, I think about falling in love with the books I was reading to my daughter when she was little. I laughed, wept, and often felt more engaged than I had with many of the books I’d been reading through and since college. I loved the simplicity in some picture books, the swift circling from a beginning to end; the warmth and heroism in Laura Ingalls Wilder, the magic of the Chronicles of Narnia. Eventually I thought beyond This is good to Can I do this -- or something like it?

I think of this love for the literature as what lured me to write for children, but behind the hope and upturning endings, were times of plain old sadness. I can’t think of one broken year that shaped me, but life as I know it sometimes splits or splinters. Writing is often my reply to loss, or putting together what I feel should be whole. Stories fill in empty spaces as we patch what was with what should have been and make something entirely new.

My teaching schedule is light, but a week break still gave me a lot of great writing time, ending with Easter dinner yesterday. It was lovely to have my daughter here, two couples, and a dad with three teens who are well-read runners and have come since the days of egg hunts. We filled two tables pushed together, I asked my friend Jess to say a short prayer. We closed our eyes and there was silence until her husband said, “Out loud.”
“I’m thinking,” Jess said. More silence, then she began, “Since there are people here of all different beliefs, I’ll begin: to whom it may concern.” Then thanks for the pleasures of being together and a request for silent wishes for those less fortunate before we ate chicken, asparagus, potatoes, and coconut cake.

Once everyone went back home I set about finishing Alice in Wonderland, then wrote an email to my older sister telling her that I still didn’t like it much though she probably did. That was sort of our pattern. She emailed back that she remembered me being disturbed and in hindsight maybe I was right. Maybe I was right? Yes, this is better than chocolate bunnies! As I read I cringed as I remember cringing as a girl when the Duchess throws the crying baby across a room. But I know there are lots of intellectual fans. I pumped up the students beforehand about the sorts of wordplay, varieties of nonsense, playing with time and theories of evolution that go on. A student asked if the author was on narcotics. There doesn’t seem evidence of that, I replied, but reading the thing I bet my students were rolling their eyes thinking: right. It was hard for even me to believe when Alice is talking to a caterpillar smoking a hookah and nibbling mushrooms.

In my children’s lit class, we’ve been listening to lots of animals. E.B. White slowly leads us to this world though two chapters of Fern devotedly nursing a piglet. In Chapter 3, we smell and see the barn in vivid detail and feel ready to hear a pig, rat, geese, sheep and a spider talk together, with Fern sitting on a stool. Probably, though we’re never explicitly told, she, too, can understand. In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, we have maybe three pages of gray Kansas before, post-tornado, we meet animals and other beings who talk. Milne lets us into Winnie-the-Pooh’s 100 Acre Wood by having Christopher Robin drag Pooh – bumpety, bumpety, bump bump bump – down the stairs, and that small human boy is our ally. And most of my students loved stepping through the wardrobe and meeting fauns, talking beavers, and an awe-invoking lion in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Then we read The Wind in the Willows. One student said she’d always loved the title and wanted to read the book – until she did. Most agreed they would never foist this on any child they loved. Toad, okay, was kind of charming, some thought, and at least he had adventures. But what was all that about spring cleaning and drinking tea and eating cakes and messing about on the river? And how could a toad ride a horse and what was he doing in a jail run by humans and why didn’t anyone notice it was a toad dressed up in a washerwoman’s dress? Grahame strained their suspension of disbelief, partly, many thought, by not giving us a specific portal there, but plunking us into the world of England’s forest and river animals. And once there overloading us with description.

Should animals talk in children’s literature? It depends on what they have to say. I wish I could remember who said this – and if anyone knows, will you tell me? Mostly we’re happy with the convention – the animal/children get to have fewer responsibilities and freedom, too – though sometimes we wonder if there should be more consequences. Gender and race sometimes don’t matter so much, for good and ill. Animals that talk can be fun and lead to who knows where: Dr. Doolite has its problems, but Jane Goodall claims that reading it as a child led to her ground-breaking work as a primatoligist. In White’s case, he used traits of the specific animals – studying academic texts on spiders, and mucking out his pig sties. Milne’s animals are more like the toys he apparently doted on, running into Harrads in London to buy yet another. In Grahame’s case, the animals do seem somewhat randomly chosen, and bump up against humans almost as randomly. For most of us, this didn’t work.

Okay, my title sounds like one for a cheesy textbook, but I’m not willing, today, to edit it out. I like thinking about openings to other worlds, even if clichéd. How does an author gently push us to new places, get us to believe in a different kind of world? At the start of my children’s lit class, we looked at opening sentences and discussed which lured, charmed, or made us think: so what? Now we’ve read Charlotte’s Web with its famous first sentence: “Where’s Papa going with that ax?” We looked at how E.B. White moves us from an everyday farm family to, at the beginning of chapter three, a barn where talking animals take over the story. How do we get tricked into, or trip into, “the willing suspension of disbelief?” (Coleridge)

The more a door seems like real wood that I can touch and smell and hear the sound of knocking, the more apt I am to believe. White’s sturdy declarative sentences, the good common Anglo Saxon nouns, build a real place scented with hay, pitchforks, stored sleds, chicken feed, and manure. The familiar details make me trust, so that I can believe in the loneliness of a pig, the helpfulness of a snarky rat, and a wise spider who knocks out flies, wraps them up, drinks their blood, and is a gifted writer, too.

Then we read Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (everyone had to get over that there are no red slippers as there are in the MGM film; they’re silver!) and went from gray Kansas to green Oz and back, on a rollicking plot in which the house hurtles through the air by the fourth page. Talk about being whisked along from adventure to entrapment to rescue and that all over again. And Baum, genius of imagination, seemed like a nice guy, married to a feminist, (lots of discussion of Dorothy’s character, or if she had one, but those witch/matriarchs?) Baum got the name for Oz, apparently, by looking at his file cabinet and the bottom drawer was labeled O-Z.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz reads more like a fairy tale: we believe because we don’t get much chance not to. Things happen in a hurry the way they must before a restless audience (Baum was father to four boys). The stepmother picks up a mirror, gets a pithy message, and calls her servant to do in the beautiful teen. A girl dances with a prince, falls in love, loses a glass slipper, worries, and the prince and the shoe is found. Not many moment moments are given to details, but we accept the frame, the force of the plot, as a world we’ll live in for a while.

Next we’ll step through a wardrobe and into the snow.
What makes YOU believe in a world?

I pleased my husband by putting The Hobbit on my children’s lit syllabus, which meant I finally had to read it. I’m used to the split in our reading tastes, and grew up as the middle child between a brother and sister who were Tolkien geeks (a word I use in the best possible way; linbinwriter recently flattered me by calling me a research geek). I was all let-me-find-another-book-by-Laura Ingalls Wilder. Animals as protagonists were fine – I can weep all over Charlotte’s Web and forget that animals don’t really talk in barnyards – and I enjoyed the Borrowers, but, with the exception of some Disney moments, there’s always been something about elves, dwarves, and dragons that’s left me unenthralled.

So recently, while I had a cold, my nice husband bought me some deli chicken soup and has reverently carried The Hobbit upstairs, then downstairs, then back to make sure I have it at hand. He kept asking me about parts have I gotten to yet, and somehow, it always seemed no. After I came back from a staff meeting, with lots of talk of pedagogy he cared nothing about my rehashing, but his eyes lit up because one of my colleagues had asked me to ask him if the ents ever found their female counterparts.

“Are you going to blog about Tolkien?” he asked. “I think you’ll get more readers.”

“But then they’ll all be disappointed when I go back to, oh, Beverly Cleary’s Ramona, or Margaret Atwood, or Ellen Wittlinger, all those books I really like to read.”

So after twenty-five years of marriage to a Tolkien lover, I finished The Hobbit. I enjoyed beautiful sentences as well as the main hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, who’s endearing for his love of a lavish second breakfast. But what’s with all the battles? Isn’t one enough in a book? And Gandalf appearing and disappearing and appearing again. I can’t quite connect to the allure of dragons nesting in gold and elves or even walking, talking trees. (By the way, my husband says the ents did find their ent-wives.)

I did like the hobbit homes, but couldn’t really understand why we had to leave them. I know the journey is supposed to be important, oh, and good and evil. I’ve got the Annotated Hobbit with a clip of a review from C.S. Lewis who notes that the tone and style changes from the common, when the Hobbit is home, to “noble and high” while away. Um, he’s not the first to suggest I’m less than noble in my tastes.

I did enjoy the book and I’ll look forward to classroom discussions down the road. But I’ll wait, maybe not twenty-five years (but maybe) before I pick up Lord of the Rings. And thanks, honey, but I guess I won’t borrow your life-sized cardboard Golum for my office. Are we genetically predisposed toward fantasy – and its trilogies! -- or realism? I’ve met at least one editor who claims she is certain she would have turned down Harry Potter if it came across her desk. Are any of you lovers of both fantasy and realism, never mind, as long as it’s well written?

Somehow I missed the Little House books when I was kid, lover of history that I was. Maybe they weren’t in my library, I don’t know, and it wasn’t a place where we were much guided, for good or for ill. (one life-changing moment was checking out Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique when I was sixteen, thinking it would offer make-up tips or something. Instead, I found myself reading about my mom and became some kind of feminist on the spot.)

Anyway, my daughter was smitten enough to start the Laura Ingalls Wilder fan club, even if it was just her and Geneva. They dressed up in long cast-off skirts and straw hats and put up posters in E’s room: “Laura Rocks.” When I took these two readers to hear Jon Scieszka read some of his fractured fairy tales, he made the mistake of seeming to thumb his nose at their idol. Eyes flashed, and the girls wrote a letter. I give Scieszka credit for writing them back and saying he didn’t REALLY mean to put her down, just that some guys, not to name names, find the books boring.

I read a few books with E. and decided now, for a project, to read the nine books in the series. Laura comes across as a wonderful heroine, I think, brave but flawed as she compares herself to her older sister, Mary, who’s more diligently good. She loves animals and her taste for adventure is tempered by common sense and family loyalty. The text moves a little slowly, which personally I don’t mind, and it speaks of the long days and nights and silences of the prairie or woods, of snow or long hot summers. The language is elegantly simple.

I’ve heard the books dismissed by some for poorly portraying Native Americans, and while there’s some language that makes one cringe, both Laura and her Pa find much to admire in some Indians they encounter, and the narrative gives some level of context for attitudes. Laura likes the Indians’ valor and love of freedom, and admires and envies their good sense in dress – on summer days she swelters wearing long sleeves, long skirts, and tight collars, while they sensibly are nearly naked. It’s only Laura’s mother, a woman who left a much more settled life for the prairie, away from all she’s ever known, who is truly derogatory, and even her attitude seems understandable to me. If someone came into my kitchen wearing nothing but skunk hides and demanded I make corn bread, I wouldn’t be happy either.

Anyway, the threat from Native Americans is far less than damage done by grasshoppers who arrive in a cloud and eat the wheat and oat fields, cyclones, three-day-blizzard after three-day-blizzard,
and the sad, sad, death of the good dog Jack, who faithfully trotted under their covered wagon, mile after mile after mile, who swam after them in the river, got swept away, and found his way home. Then one night turned his three circles and went to sleep. After these disasters, Ma comments at most, “Oh, Charles,” or with some wisdom: Where there’s a will there’s a way, All’s well that ends well, or We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

A lot of my work begins with a picture that sticks in my mind, so I love the story of how C.S. Lewis first imagined a faun holding an umbrella and wrapped package by a gaslight in the forest when he was sixteen. The image came and went, until he was 43 and and decided to turn it into a story. It didn’t quite work until nine years later, when he had dreams about lions, which got things moving. He was also inspired by children being sent to his house to escape the London blitz in WWII, and their presence reminded him of the pleasures of childhood reading. And how once upon a time he and his brother used to sit in an old wardrobe and tell each other stories.

Lewis calls imagination a faculty that “stirs and troubles” the reader with “a dim sense of something beyond his reach.”