MARK YOUR CALENDAR
Upcoming Events for Children’s Librarians
NEWS AND NOTES
Erica Siskind’s Art: Congratulations to ACL member Erica Siskind, who works at the Rockridge Branch of the Oakland Public Library. Her artwork appeared on a prop book in the HBO television series "Six Feet Under." The book was involved in an important plot point, so Erika’s artwork was seen to full effect!
Marilyn Simons: Congratulations also go out to ACL member Marilyn Simons, longtime children’s librarian in Mill Valley. Marilyn recently "resigned/retired" from her position to try something new and part-time. Best Wishes!
New Director at Berkeley Public: Jackie Griffin, formerly Director of the Eugene, Oregon Public Library, has accepted the position as Director of the Berkeley Public Library. Jackie is very supportive of children’s services and we wish her good luck.
SLJ EDITOR: Julie Cummins, who served less than a year as editor at School Library Journal, has been "terminated." In her short term, the magazine received the Grolier Award. No reason for her dismissal was available at the time of our deadline.
OBITUARIES
Betty Bacon: Author and ACL member Betty Bacon died on June 6th at the age of 88 at her home in Berkeley. Known as an activist, Bacon was born in Hollywood, CA, but was a Bryn Mawr graduate and New Jersey resident who moved to the Bay Area in 1953 to avoid the McCarthy-era blacklist.
Bacon earned her MLS from UC Berkeley in 1958, worked in Contra Costa and Solano counties as a librarian, and was one of the founders of the Bay Area Storytelling Festival.
Margaret Sutton: Margaret Sutton, author of the "Judy Bolton" series died in May 2000. Although no longer in print, the Judy Bolton mysteries offered a more realistic teen girl detective than Nancy Drew. For many years, she was a resident of Berkeley, CA.
Tove Jansson: Finnish author Tove Jansson died on June 27 in Helsinki at age 86. Her many books for children include the "Moomins" series about a family of trolls. She wrote the series, which included eight novels and four picture books, between 1945 and 1970. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux began reissuing the books in 1989. In 1966, Jansson received the Hans Christian Andersen Medal from IBBY for her contributions to children’s literature.
Fred Marcellino: Caldecott Honor recipient Fred Marcellino died July 12th at age 61 from colon cancer. The Brooklyn native attended Copper Union and was a Fulbright Scholar. He began his professional career designing album covers, then switched to designing book jackets.
Marcellino’s children’s books include Puss In Boots, for which he received a Caldecott Honor in 1990, and I, Crocodile, which was an ALA Notable Children’s Book. One of his most recent works is the re-illustrated version of E. B. White’s Trumpet of the Swan.
ACL INSTITUTE: MARC ARONSON’S SPEECH ON FICTION/NONFICTION
ACL would like to thank Marc Aronson for allowing us to reprint the speech he presented at the April 2001 ACL Institute:
What are the reasons for writing fiction? In fiction, everything is up to the author. The challenge, and the opportunity, is that voice, character, plot, line by line language, imagery, style are completely open. The author is free to use anything in his or her training, experience, and imagination to enrapture the reader. The author is building a world for the sole purpose of having you inhabit it in your mind.
Fiction offers absolute control to the author in creating the text, but then a curious thing happens. Once it exists, it also offers great freedom to the reader. The reader can see in, around, behind, through the characters and stories the author has placed there. That ability to set off resonance, that aura of possibility in which we add our own experiences and insights to what the author depicts on the page, is the magic of fiction. Though created by a specific person at a given time and place according to a well-defined plan, as people read it in other settings, it can become something completely new. It is like reality in that its meanings are unstable.
A danger in books for younger readers is that some authors, critics, parents, children, and, especially, teachers, want the meanings of fiction to be highly definable and clear. They become preoccupied with the "message" of the text – does it teach girls to be strong and independent or preoccupied with appearance and popularity; does it encourage African Americans to see themselves as accomplished and proud, or marginal and inferior; does it help teenagers to make wise decisions in relationships or to be reckless in using drugs and sex. The problem is, tying books down to any of these objectives, no matter how laudable, violates the essence of fiction. It seeks to make meaning so stable that they are completely reliable. A book that has lost any capacity to be read dangerously, has lost its autonomy. It has traded in its status as art for a mess of porridge – for a parental blessing that is a kind of curse.
Fiction, then, is an alchemical substance that is created with great control and yet contains within it great freedom of interpretation.
What are the reasons for writing nonfiction? In nonfiction, everything is based on a preexisting reality. There is something outside of the book that is true, and the author is bound to that truth. Nonfiction authors have great latitude in form: how to describe and evoke that truth and make it vivid to readers. And they have great freedom in thought: they can take you inside the process of weighing and measuring as we attempt to find what the truth is. If the boundaries of fiction are set by the limits of an author’s imagination, the boundaries of nonfiction are in the author’s ability to envision, to judge, and to describe something that exists or once did.
Nonfiction offers two types of rewards or pleasures. One is that it adds to our store of knowledge. That is, after reading the book or article we can better describe, understand, or simply identify some key elements of an aspect of reality. We know, say, which models of car our favorite manufacturer is planning to issue this year, or we can describe the mating habits of a gorilla, or we can explain why, by the seventeenth century, Spain which had stolen vast amounts of gold and silver from the Americas, was falling behind Britain, which had no New World riches.
For many authors writing nonfiction for younger readers, this first goal is sufficient. Once they have told you something about T Rex, or captioned neat photos of deadly insects, or described key events in some important or exemplary life, they are done. In a sense, they are treating nonfiction the way the message-finders are judging fiction: they write a book to pass along a clear, well-understood nugget of information to young readers. Just as those critics of novels rob fiction of its real power, authors who settle for this simplistic goal have missed the second and perhaps most import good that nonfiction offers: it gives us the opportunity share in the operation of the human mind.
What is "knowledge"? It is human beings trying to make sense of what goes around us. Nonfiction is the record of that effort, of our pondering, testing, questioning, examining, and then trying to formulate what we have understood. Nonfiction is the play of mind, and there is nothing more potentially interesting than that.
The danger in nonfiction is a version of the danger in fiction: the educational impulse. If you see your book as some kind of super tutor, imparting truth to restless students whom you entertain with images and jokes, or keep in their seats with tests, or hope to inspire with well chosen examples, then you will not be eager to show the behind the scenes story of how we came to know what we know. Your goal is to transmit settled fact, not to open up new inquiry. That means you have entirely abandoned that second level of pleasure, meaning, and depth.
Historical fiction is a particularly odd mixed case. How much of history is required to qualify a novel as historical? And how little too radically violates the nature of the name? There is no easy answer. A book that is entirely counterfactual – if the south had won the civil war, for example – can be wonderful historical fiction. If there is no baseline fidelity to even central historical events that one can demand, how can you be sure that getting a hairstyle, phrase, or name wrong ruins such a book? And yet I suspect that as she writes, each author does set such a line, a minimum standard of accuracy that she will work within while inventing, shaving, altering here or there.
I will leave it to some of our esteemed fiction authors to discuss how they set that line, that inviolable barrier against pure invention. But I want to take you inside the issues in nonfiction, in how we remain faithful to fact. Because when you understand how richly contested this terrain is, I think you’ll see why I find nonfiction so full of possibility. There are so many, many ways we can talk about history and writers for young readers have hardly begun to explore them.
First, with the aid of some examples that I hope you find surprising and intriguing, I will tell you a bit about the debates over history in the past two hundred years, and then I’ll show you how the book I wrote on Ralegh fits into them.
Some of the great histories were written in the nineteenth century, and many of the authors – all Europeans or Americans – shared a belief about what they needed to do. They saw history in evolutionary terms. There was within the history of each people or nation – and those were the units they tended to look at – a seed or germ of what they would become. Their history was the working out of this original essence. These histories were often tied to racial ideas, concepts about the essential characteristics of types of a people. Thus the animating principle of the Anglo-Saxons, according to them, was individualism and freedom. For the French it was reason and glory. For the Germans it was the creation of a state and of great music and philosophy.
There is something interestingly ambiguous about these histories if you read them today. Some are quite well written. This was popular history, history meant to bind and help create a nation by giving people a shared sense of destiny. The past mattered and was accessible to all. But it was also rife with racial assumptions, and beliefs about who was and wasn’t English, or American, or French, or German. This is the history of school pageants, of Winston Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt: passionate, muscular, convincing, moving, long sagas completely under the control of the masterful writer who leaves you either inspired or sickened at the limitation of its worldview.
Here is a musical example that is an expression of this same view of history: [Wagner, leitmotif from compact ring]
The longest-lived version of this is Marxist history, which grew directly out of this tradition. It tells a very clear story about class oppression, and the inevitable grinding of history towards revolution and freedom. Marxist history is a perfect example, you either love it and feel you finally understand how the world works, or hate it, and feel it to be a lot ideological bombast which forces all inconvenient facts to lay on the same procrustean bed.
You may have that reaction because the next wave of historians. As colleges developed graduate schools, starting in Germany in the last third of the nineteenth century and then spreading to the rest of the world, history changed. Specialists started to look very closely at given moments in history. And when they did, when they examined the land records of one town over the reign of a monarch, or exactly who voted for what and why in a century of Parliaments, all of those grand evolutionary stories began to seem bloated and ridiculous.
These historians just wanted facts, and when you looked at facts, you did not see inevitable racial ideas that had their seed at the dawn of time and inevitably came to fruition, fortuitously, in the very world-spanning nineteenth century empires in which the historians happened to live. Instead they saw accident, selfishness, chance, and a whole polyglot army of individuals making history in their own private and daily battles.
Here’s the twist. These historians were in a sense much more democratic than their predecessors. Their histories were not constructed around racial sagas but around spiky clusters of fact in which the race, creed, or gender of the individuals did not influence the story. But the histories were much less popular. The histories were monographs written for other historians. As historians’ books actually captured more about real people, their books became less interesting to the people at large.
This musical sample will show you the contrast, an approach that is free of those dense narrative lines with their racial/mythic stories, but is also much less easy to follow and to appreciate. [Schoenberg]
As graduate schools and dense-fact-laden monograph writing flourished, some historians tried to make the craft ever more pure. They turned to statistics, to economic measures, eventually to computers, in an effort to create history that truly was a science. They wanted to rule out of the profession anything that could not be proven with the rigor of a mathematical theorem. Using these highly abstract tools allowed historians finally to learn about the lives about people who previously never made it into history books: illiterate workers, slaves, women, children. Using sophisticated number crunching of birth, marriage, property, court, and death records historians could paint pictures of lives that we had heretofore only seen through the eyes of the wealthy and the educated.
But this did not stop the debates. A contention such as that slavery was profitable for slave owners sent computers whirring and ink spilling as one set of very sophisticated statistics battled against the other, as one group asked whether it was even valid to ask a question like that without looking at the moral and human cost of slavery, while another said one could not understand slavery without completely mapping out how it worked.
Yet another group of historians did not see themselves in either side of this debate. To them the entire effort to reduce history to provable fact was wrongheaded, it missed what history was truly about: imaginatively entering into and recreating the ideas, the worldview, the thoughts, of people in the past. The past was not facts, it was a realm that you could visit through an act of imagination.
The great advocate of this view was the British philosopher R.G. Collingwood. He wrote that a historian’s work, "may begin by discovering the outside of an event, but it can never end there…his main task is to think himself into this action, to discern the thought of its agent." How could the historian do this? "by re-thinking" those thoughts "in his own mind."
If this sounds a great deal like historical fiction, it should. Collingwood asked the historian to be a kind of novelist, which also set a very high bar for the fiction writer. You had to know all of the facts and circumstances as well as you could, even being able to read the written language of that past era. But then, having assimilated all of that surrounding information you must enter into the mind, into the very thoughts, of the people you study so that you could both think with them, and view those thoughts from outside with the long lens of looking back from the present day.
I am taking you on this quick trot through schools of history because all the issues that come up in judging books for young readers depend on which one you belong to. A Collingwoodian history will be slammed by a numbers cruncher as mush, while a detailed social history will be seen by a nationalist saga-writer as so much scene-setting without the only action that counts. You’ll see that as I cover two more schools, and get us up to the present.
Influenced by anthropology a group of French historians began to question what the units of history should be. Why do we consider nations, governments, or royal families, important? They suggested that for, say, the peoples who have lived around the Mediterranean Sea for thousands of years, long-enduring rhythms of olive growing, fishing, and festivals have been far more significant than which so-called country they lived in, or, even less, which king, pope, or republic was nominally in power.
This view, the so-called Annales School, influenced children’s literature in that it asked questions about our family categories. The whole Centuries of Childhood approach that treated teenage, say, as a historical construction, follows from this school. But America has always presented something of a problem for these historians, since its history is so short, and individualism and change are often considered its keynotes. Dealing with America, Annales-influenced historians have tended to focus on backwoods farmers, striking workers – those who have sought to hold on to old ways against the pressure of new economies.
And that brings me to the present, where we have come an interesting full circle. Since the 60s, history has split into many communal narratives: black history, women’s history, gay and lesbian history. The unit of history is no longer the nation, or even the people, but rather one group. Yet the history of that group can be that old-style narrative saga, where the abiding themes may now be oppression and resistance, or identity formation, or the life of one unsung heroine, or private space versus public space.
As a product of my time, I find myself drawn to that seed unfolding narrative history. I am treating Ralegh as the first book in a trilogy that will cover the entire colonial period. Collectively called The American Dream, the trilogy will treat three different visions of the New World: the bonanza-hunting of Ralegh’s El Dorado days; the search for perfection on earth of the Puritans in England and America; and the rational pragmatism and radical idealism of the Revolutionaries and constitution-makers.
There is a huge difference, though, between what I write and those nineteenth century historians. My unit is not racially or even nationally based. Even though I am talking about the idea of America that became the United States, the narratives of the Indians, of the slaves, of the opponents of the new nation and the victims – such as heretics, so-called witches, Quakers – of early colonial leaders, are as important as those of judges, preachers, and governors.
I do not think I have to accomplish this by giving a kind of encyclopedic equal time to each actor, but rather by always being alert to the different ways the same story might be seen by different peoples. Thus, in Ralegh, what one of Ralegh’s captains saw as a new paradise, a Golden land inhabited by Golden Age natives, another saw as territory to plunder and mine. While for the natives, it was merely home. In the second book in the trilogy this will arise when the Puritans’ vision of New England as a land prepared for them by God actually parallels how the Indians who lived there saw it. Each assumed they had a divine title to the very same rocky hills. What seemed to each side as grounds for terrible conflict looks to the historian like startling similarity.
In writing Ralegh, I profited from that second group of historians, too, the academic analyzers. Because of their careful studies, I did not have to see the story of the Spanish Armada as the inevitable triumph of Anglo-Saxon freedom over Spanish tyranny. Instead I could learn, and thus pass on, about the English bungling in fighting Spain, the near-miss of the second Armada which, but for a gale, would have had free access to England and been in great position to destroy the bedraggled British fleet. I was able to follow every step of Elizabeth’s progress to Norwich, which told me more about the theatricality of her reign and how closely daily life in her court resembled Midsummer Night’s Dream, than any full biography. I could see, through an expert’s eye, the seating arrangements at the first royal performance of Hamlet, which turned the event into a play within a play within a play.
The social historians helped out, too. It is interesting, if rather sad, to read contemporary British historians write about the great moments in their past, such as the Elizabethan period. They are so reacting against the old glorified nationalist sagas that they deny themselves the pleasure of savoring that past. Rises and falls in real wages, the cost of wheat, life expectancy, become far more important than Shakespeare or the Armada, or Ralegh. Perhaps that is like American historians who have read one too speech about America as the land of the free and the home of the brave, and want to be sure to keep track of racism, oppression, and hypocrisy. If a bit breast-beating, these new histories are valuable. You do see the social order behind the glory of court, which made Ralegh’s, and, especially, John White’s, urgent desire to start new lives in a new land much more vivid and pointed. America was not merely a hope, it was a desperate need.
That brings us to the communal historians. Perhaps the greatest change in history since the last time anyone wrote about the period of European settlement in the New World for young readers is opening up the question of whose history we are describing. If the Indians’ and later the slaves’ histories matter as much as the Europeans, and women and children as much as men, and the illiterate as much as the constitution-drafters, the whole narrative thrust of the older histories has to be changed. And, yet we cannot lose sight of those individuals, and those moments, that cast the longest shadow on the rest of our history.
The real challenge of history today is to create a kind of mobile, a structure in which all of the parts matter, all of the stories count, all of the voices are heard, and yet there is a central narrative that moves forward, and carries big ideas with it. So that is the challenge, free each actor to speak, don’t silence the other voices to make one familiar figure dominant. But, at the same time, don’t abandon the thrust, the drive, that comes from having one person, or a crucial concept, at the heart of the book.
You know what that sounds like? It sounds like those multi-voiced novels that have become so popular in recent years in the hands of Walter Dean Myers, and Paul Fleischman, and Virginia Euwer Wolf, and Virginia Walter and others. And that is just about right. History should be of its time. It should be fresh, and lively. It should be open to new ways of seeing the past and telling the story. It should, in other words, be quite as challenging, engaging, and inspiring as fiction. And, best of all, it should be true.