Taraneh Matloob on Susan Fletcher's Shadow Spinner

I was at the ChLA conference in June 2011 when I met Naomi Wood, Associate Professor of English at Kansas State University. During the course of a conversation about writers and writing, she mentioned that one of her graduate students had written a paper on Susan Fletcher's Shadow Spinner. Thanks to Naomi's e-introduction, I was able to read that paper and correspond with its writer, Taraneh Matloob.

[Uma] What drew you to consider Shadow Spinner as the subject for your paper?

[Taraneh]  The first time I heard about Shadow Spinner I was in my home country, Iran and I came across an article in a children’s literature scholarly journal. The name of the article was “How I met Shahrazad, the storyteller.” It was an interview with Susan Fletcher by Hossein Ebrahimi Elvand, the translator of the book in Iran. I was fascinated by Fletcher’s respect and passion for a culture different from her own and was inspired to know more about outsiders who set their story outside the mainstream culture. Initially, I started my research in the field from my own reading and writing and continued my study when I was awarded three months fellowship at International Youth Library of Munich. There, I had access to invaluable resources and also had the chance to meet scholars in the field. After being admitted to Children’s Literature graduate program in Kansas State I chose multicultural literature as the main subject that I want to study further, purposefully and passionately. Continuing my research in the field I realized that Susan Fletcher’s Shadow Spinner is the best case to examine cultural authenticity. In my first and second reading of the book I was not consciously aware of the cultural elements interwoven to the story but I was certain that the book is an authentic representation of the Persian culture so I started working on that with a critical perspective.

[Uma] You take the position that rather than place the telling of culturally grounded stories out of bounds for those outside the culture, we should instead recognize writers like Susan, in your words an "outsider, practicing to develop an insider's eye." I'm fascinated by this, because really, this is what all fiction is about, the creation of illusion. In your view, what are the dangers for the unwary writer of navigating that coral reef of culturally grounded story when the culture is not the writer's own?

[Taraneh]I believe there is a serious concern when a book provides an incorrect picture of the other culture. As Edward Said discusses, inaccurate information about the East can change established theories and concepts through the history.  Of greatest concern is that those authors from the dominant culture, mastered in authorship, apply their imagination to create an appealing but an inaccurate and a distorted view of the dominated culture. However, avoiding of everything to do with the West and in other words encouraging anti-Orientalism may have a more negative consequence than Orientalism because it brings a deadly dominant silence. So, although as Alcoff correctly indicates speaking for others is arrogant, vain, unethical, and politically illegitimate the solution is not simply restricting the practice of speaking for others to speaking for groups of which one is a member. Indeed, the fault of the Western authors who fail to respect the rights of people of minority groups cannot be responded by prejudice against any effort to speak because as Fletcher indicates,  if “we don’t share our stories—trading them across our borders as freely as spices and ebony and silk—we will all be strangers forever” (132).

[Uma] Conversely do you have thoughts on the dangers for the insider writer of failing to take the broadest possible audience into account?

[Taraneh] In Iran we are introduced to the Western culture mainly through translation; Iranian authors rarely write about the West from their point of view.  However, it is important to have Iranian multicultural authors who write about the West from the outside position because Western audience needs to know how their culture is viewed from the East. Conversely, this is true for the Westerners who write about the East. Marjan’s story is a tale never told in the history of storytelling in Iran and every culture needs the stories that have not been told. It does matter to hear those stories, both from the inside and outside. It is important to hear Fletcher’s voice who is outsider, practicing to develop an insider’s eye.  Iranian young adults are eager and have the right to know how Western societies have understood and interpreted their life, culture, and country. Meanwhile, it is the responsibility and commitment of outsiders to not write unless they are confident that they know the culture enough and this confidence is achieved mainly through experiencing and having a conversation with member(s) from the other culture. Every culture has very specific characteristics that may not be captured by the outsider’s first attempts and therefore the work needs to be critiqued by insiders’ eye before publication.

[Uma] Anything else you want to add?

[Taraneh] I believe multicultural children’s literature is a new and very fragile field and portrayal of the other culture is the responsibility of every author, who is sensible of the great diversity rooted in different cultures and seeks to develop heightened sensitivity and understanding of others. In so doing, what matters is not to project the sense of nationality but to promote the sense of humanity, what is in danger of being lost in a battle between cultures.



[Uma] Thank you, Taraneh, for shedding this new and interesting perspective on an old and often contentious debate.

Ensorcelment By Story: Susan Fletcher on Shadow Spinner

Hardcover edition, Shadow Spinner

 I first heard Susan Fletcher speak about her writing journey with Shadow Spinner when she was an alumna guest speaker at VCFA and I was still relatively new on the faculty. At first I was skeptical. Sure. Another white writer romanticizes the Middle East--what's new about that? But as I heard Susan speak, I became more and more convinced that she was about to make me shift how I thought about the telling of story across cultures. Here was a writer, I could see, who had done the work and done it with humility, serving the story and not herself. I was moved, and that was something I hadn't expected. I'm happy to say that Susan is now a friend and colleague on the faculty at VCFA.

It's my great delight to open 2012 with this interview. Welcome, Susan Fletcher.

[Uma] What were the delights and dangers for you of daring to place this coral reef of a story on the page?

[Susan] When I remember what it was like to write Shadow Spinner, I can’t help but think of the character Richard Dreyfuss played in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I’m not saying that aliens took over my mind – exactly – but I definitely felt in the grip of an obsession. It started when I was still drafting Sign of the Dove, and entire paragraphs of Shadow Spinner sprang full-blown into my head. I would minimize the page I was working on, take down the words I was hearing, then go back to Sign of the Dove. The obsession kept hold of me throughout the year and a half it took me to write Shadow Spinner and didn’t release me even after I finished. So I wrote a speech about Shahrazad and the importance of stories. I sketched out a sequel. I took a class in storytelling. It became annoying after a while. I couldn’t wait for the obsession to let go, so I could move wholeheartedly into my next project. Confession: Now I’m longing to be ensorcelled like that again.

I did worry about the fact that I was writing outside my culture. I read a lot of books, took a class, and asked for feedback from an Iranian friend and an Arabic woman who had worked for a princess in a royal harem.  Also, I had the stunning good fortune of meeting the sister-in-law of renowned Persian scholar Abbas Milani, who is now Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford. Abbas was generous way beyond anything I expected or deserved. He vetted the manuscript for accuracy – twice – and recommended more books for me to study.  He read Shadow Spinner as if it were an emergent poem, directing my ear to the faint ringing chimes of local metaphors and suggesting that they might resound throughout the whole.

[Uma--aside] And they do, they do! Watch this blog for an interview with Taraneh Matloob, whose research led her to Susan's work and who, like me, was taken with the loving care that Susan exercised in her research and her literary choices.

[Susan] Another thing that gave me the courage to write this book is that the 1001 Nights, on which Shadow Spinner is based, is such a cultural mélange.  Some scholars claim that the tales originated in India; many others believe that they originated in a lost, pre-Islamic Persian book of fairy tales called Hazar Afsaneh, or “Thousand Stories.” From Persia, the collection moved to the Arabic world, morphing into new cultural articulations and accumulating new tales.  The various translations we have today include stories from ancient Mesopotamia and India, early medieval Persia and Iraq, and Egypt of the late Middle Ages.  A couple of the most famous tales have no known precedents before Antoine Galland translated the Nights into French around 1704. So the 1001 Nights is imbued with the perspectives and contributions of many different cultures over more than a thousand years.  Moreover, it is a story about a woman who tells stories from many different cultures.  In a way, those of us who have retold or re-interpreted parts of the Nights (including  Robert Louis Stevenson,  Jorge Luis Borges, and John Barth, among many others) are simply adding another layer to these many-layered tales…and carrying on the tradition of Shahrazad.

[Uma] In juxtaposing the tale of young Marjan with the story of Shahrazad, you open it up to the world--there is a world of young girls in the kingdom, anxiously waiting to see if the Sultan will like each night's story, and spare its teller's life, and thus possibly their own. By implication, and by giving agency to a young girl who has herself been deeply wounded in body and spirit, you offer hope to all young girls everywhere. It was a transcendent moment in the book for me when I arrived at that understanding and yet it came very simply and naturally; it came from within the story. What was the line you had to walk between story and message, and how did you manage to stay true to story?

[Susan] I usually have no idea what the themes of my books are going to be until I’ve worked my way through to a story that seems to hold together.  Then I ask myself, “What is this book trying to say?” With Shadow Spinner, I knew that “Stories can save your life,” would be one of the themes.  But the idea of giving agency to a girl who’s been deeply wounded came through working out the story. 

I thought about the world of Shahrazad, in which the king takes a new girl as his wife every night and kills her the next day.  I thought about the mothers of girls inside the city and wondered what desperate measures they might take in order to protect their daughters.  I thought about Shahrazad’s having to come up with a new story each night for nearly three years. What if she got storyteller’s block?   What if she forgot which stories she’d already told? 

As a writer, I’m always more interested in story situations in which a child is the primary actor.  So I imagined a girl who begins collecting stories out of admiration for Shahrazad, whom she idolizes for having saved the lives of so many girls in the city.  And I imagined that the girl’s mother does what she feels she has to in order to protect her daughter.

[Uma] Would you like to say something about the process of having this book translated into Farsi and published in Iran?

[Susan] The first I knew about the Farsi translation was when Abbas Milani called to tell me about it.  The Persian translator knew how to contact Abbas – but not me. The translator, Hossein Ebrahimi (penname: Elvand), invited me to a conference in Iran, but for various complicated reasons, I was unable to attend. I was thrilled to learn later that Shadow Spinner was popular with children in Iran. And eventually I went to Iran to research my other Persian novel, Alphabet of Dreams.

Over the years, Elvand and I became friends. He was an extraordinary man. Both Elvand and Abbas vetted Alphabet of Dreams.  Elvand and I corresponded by email as he translated Alphabet of Dreams into Farsi.  I’ve written about Elvand in The Horn Book Magazine, March/April, 2009.

More on Shadow Spinner before the end of the week. Look for an interview with Taraneh Matloob, writer of a children's book in Farsi, and currently a doctoral student in children's literature at Oakland University in Michigan.

Mount Kailas

This will probably be the last post of the year, as I'm revising a novel while also trying to get ready for the Vermont winter residency and my trip to India following that. But I wanted to end 2011 with an image.

This image.

This is Mount Kailas (or Kailash; Gang Tise in Tibetan), a rare sunlit view of the giant peak that rises to an astonishing 22,028 feet.

The picture of Kailas gilded by sunlight was sent to me by an Internet acquaintance who has my undiluted admiration for having recently been on the Kailas-Manasarovar yatra (Sanskrit for "journey" or  "pilgrimage").  Her group did the full parikrama (Sanskrit for "circumambulation") of the mountain on foot.

This part of Asia is a land of contested borders and competing claims of jurisdiction, with force and occupation ruling the day. It's also a place of great mystical significance for Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and followers of the indigenous Tibetan religion of Bön. It was probably an object of awe and worship for unknown ancient belief systems that predate any religion we know today. Hindus believe it to be the abode of Lord Shiva himself, guardian of the forces of destruction and dissolution in the universe.

And finally, it's a place in danger. Himalayan glaciers are melting at unprecedented rates in our time.

So I want to end 2011 by taking some time to look at this mountain against light and cloud and sky. Just look. And see if it doesn't somehow provide perspective.

Naomi Rose on Tashi and the Tibetan Flower Cure

Author-illustrator Naomi Rose, welcome and congratulations on your new picture book from Lee & Low, Tashi and the Tibetan Flower Cure. (Review excerpt from Booklist: "gracefully introducing Tibetan words and customs...this upbeat story provides a rare look at Tibetan American culture.")

[Uma] Your own inquiry into Tibetan wisdom and culture is important to your life. How did that inquiry lead you to the mysteries of the flower cure?

[Naomi] About 10 years ago, my father was recovering from cancer. My mother, who knew of my interest in Tibetan culture, emailed me a true story about a Tibetan man who miraculously recovered from cancer. The story was written by a hospice worker. She had tried to use the Tibetan Flower Cure to bring comfort to the Tibetan man in his final days. Instead of simply bringing him comfort, the Tibetan Flower Cure actually cured him! But it wasn't just the flowers that evoked the cure. It was the coming together of communities in support of this man's well being. The doctor was baffled about the unexpected healing. But the Tibetan man explained that the disease couldn't live in a body filled with so much love. It was such a beautiful story of the power of kindness and community, I knew I had to write it for children.

[Uma] In the end this is a story of geographies blending and merging through the connections between the generations. Talk about both those elements and how you show this blending of places and cultures in your art.

[Naomi] When I have visited the homes of Tibetan-Americans, I've seen an intriguing mixture of American and Tibetan elements. The homes generally have a special room dedicated for the most sacred items. This room is specifically for meditation, chanting, and prayer. The rest of the house is a combination of Tibetan and American culture, such as prayer flags flying in the yard next to a lawn mower, thangkas hanging above televisions, and so on. In a way, this approach blends the sacred and mundane, which I really appreciate. So I was careful to place Tibetan items in the ordinary rooms and scenes in my art.

Another aspect of blending is the dress. Some Tibetan-Amercians, especially the elders, continue to wear chupas, the traditional Tibetan clothing. Others, especially the younger generations, wear American clothes. I portrayed this in the illustrations with Popola wearing chupas, and Amala and Tashi wearing American clothes.

[Uma] Reversals drive the structure of this book: Sickness to healing, inaction to action, I could go on. I know you worked on this book over time and in many different versions, but can you tell me how you arrived at the final structure?

[Naomi] After several years of working on the story on my own and with my critique group, it finally earned some interest at Lee & Low Books. Louise May was the editor-in-chief at the time and she and I worked on the story for almost 18 months. But when she finally showed it to the editorial committee, they passed on the book. I was devastated. I filed the story far away. Then about six months later, I read a newly-released picture book from Lee and Low, written in free verse. I loved the voice. Inspired, I rewrote Tashi and the Tibetan Flower Cure in free verse, first person, present tense. I wrote the story without thinking of a publisher. I wrote it from my heart. I knew I had a good story, much better than before. I showed it to Louise May and it required only a few minor revisions before the acquisitions committee accepted it.

[Uma] Finally, can you share a recipe for solja?

[Naomi] Solja, or Tibetan Butter Tea, is definitely an acquired taste. It is especially enjoyed when living in high altitudes and freezing temperatures. Tibetans in Tibet have very elaborate ways of preparing the tea. These ways may include using butter churns and horsehair (to strain the tea). But here is a way to make it more simply.

Solja

Makes 5 to 6 cups of tea:
Ingredients:
plain black tea (2 tea bags or 1 tbsp. of loose leaf)
¼ tsp. of salt
2 tbsp. of butter
½ cup of milk

Boil 5 to 6 cups of water. Pour two tea bags or one tbsp. of loose leaf into the boiling water and wait 2-3 minutes. Gently remove the tea bags or strain the tea leaves. Pour the tea into a large container with a lid or a blender. Then add salt, butter and milk. Shake it for 2 or 3 minutes. Serve it immediately. Enjoy!

This delicious tea will keep you warm in the winter and help you feel healthy and strong.

[Uma] Thank you Naomi. And here's another review from one of my favorite book bloggers, the BookDragon.

Cynthia Leitich Smith on Diabolical: From Literary Homage to Growing the Craft

Cynthia Leitich Smith's intelligent, quirky, robust vampire series has swirled into an industry all its own. Her Dracula-inspired quartet of prose novels in the Tantalize series includes Tantalize, Eternal, Blessed, and Diabolical, which will be released by Candlewick on Jan. 24, 2012. Tantalize: Kieren’s Story, illustrated by Ming Doyle, is now available, and the Eternal graphic novel, also to be illustrated by Doyle, is currently in production.

In addition, two short stories, “Haunted Love,” originally published in Immortal, edited by P.C. Cast and “Cat Calls,” originally published in Sideshow, edited by Deborah Noyes, are available for free download from various e-retailers.

The books and shorts are published by Candlewick Press in North America, Walker Books in the U.K., and various other publishers around the globe.

I asked Cyn:

 

The world of your fiction has grown from a kind of whimsical alternative Austin with lurking dangers to encompassing nothing short of heaven and hell. How has writing the Quincie P. Morris books grown you as a writer?

Here is her reply.

I credit the dark master, Abraham Stoker, for much of the past decade of my writing life. 

The first quartet of novels in the Tantalize series are a conversation with his 1897 horror classic, Dracula, which likewise features varied settings (the Carpathian Mountains, the streets of London) and an international cast (the Dutch doctor, Texas gunslinger, English lawyer, etc.). 

My first of the books is firmly set in Austin, but from there, we travel to Dallas, Chicago, a fictional small town in Michigan, the outskirts of San Antonio, north to Montpelier, Vermont; and its surrounding countryside, climaxing in a battle that literally rages from heaven to hell.

These multi-creature-verse stories are told from four points of view. A tie-in graphic novel, Tantalize: Kieren’s Story released this fall, and an Eternal graphic novel is in the works.

When I first began jotting notes in late 2000/early 2001, I had hopes of multiple books. Though many suggested there wasn’t a market for Gothic YA tales, I began writing with a super-arc in mind. Each of the books would have a beginning, middle, and end, but they would also combine to tell a larger story. My dream concept was an ambitious one—to extend Stoker’s world, starting with a pseudo-descendant (a many-times great niece) of the Texan character Quincey P. Morris and then working my way back to the root material, a demonic academy that lingers in Romanian-Hungarian folklore.

At the time, I was a long-time fantasy reader but had published only realistic, contemporary fiction.
 

Suddenly, I needed to learn world- and creature-building and to craft a story in which both were necessary for the protagonist’s internal and external journeys. Soon it became the protagonists’—plural—internal and external journeys, even as my world and its varied population continued to grow.
 

I had to consider the power of metaphor in conveying such weighty themes as alcoholism, homelessness, gender and power, sexual assault, bigotry, culture/identity, biological warfare, plague, child abuse, slavery, indentured servitude, sexual orientation, free will, the role of faith, good and evil, holy sacrifice, the nature of God, redemption, forgiveness, destiny, and grace.
 

You know, in a fun, occasionally funny, way that also inspired tears, while keeping the action moving, integrating compelling suspense/mystery elements, and making the occasional teenager (or YA librarian) swoon over a certain fictional guardian angel. Or two.
 

Meanwhile, I navigated quasi-epistolary elements, unreliable point of view, alternating point of view, juxtaposing urban/rural with high fantasy, translating from prose to graphic format, embracing the short and long form, and writing across race, region, culture, gender, orientation, nationality and species.
 

Worst of all, I had to learn to write love scenes—fresh, poignant, passionate love scenes that rang true and spoke to the adolescent experience. That nearly killed me.
 

Put mildly, the psychological and intellectual challenges have been numerous and formidable. The experience has equipped me with a toolbox of skills that I hope to carry into future projects. But my more valuable takeaway is what I learned about YA readers and my relationship to them.
 

I’ve learned to more seriously consider the young audience.
 

That’s not fashionable. You often hear writers say, “I write for myself” or “I write for people” (not merely—gasp—kids), or, though usually not so straightforwardly, “I write for acclaim.”
 

Don’t get me wrong. I do cater to my own inner brat (and a brat she is) and my darling readers over 18 (who generate about half my mail) and those remarkable champions/gatekeepers. I’m honored that the books have been critically well received and appreciate the importance of that in widely sharing them.
 

But my previous works had been for younger kids. And while I heard from a handful of grieving tweens and thoughtful Native readers in the wake of Rain Is Not My Indian Name, the vast majority of my feedback came from grown-ups.
 

With the Tantalize series, for the first time, I found myself presented with countless more personal interactions, such as:
a fourteen-year-old, big-city boy clinging to a tattered copy of Tantalize—the first novel he’d ever finished;

• a pair of suburban African-American teen cousins wanting to talk to me about my choice of “black” as a color of heaven; when so often in Gothics, its only association is with evil;

• a reader ranting (with many exclamation marks) that a girl is NOTHING!!! without a boy to love her;

• a handful of girls writing about their physically/emotionally abusive “romantic” relationships and how Quincie’s arc inspired them to view themselves and their situations in a new light;

• a date-rape survivor who wrote to say she’d copied an exchange at the end of Blessed and taped it to her bedroom mirror;

• a young lesbian who wanted to know why the only gay main characters were male and adults (which is no longer the case with the upcoming release of Diabolical);

• a reader who wrote of Miranda, “Nice to see an Asian girl pick up a battle-axe!”

• foodies who requesting recipes from the Sanguini’s menus;

• Ausitinites and Chicagoans thrilling to see their neighborhoods reflected in a YA book;

• high schoolers delighted that they actually “got” the Hawthorne references (“English class was good for something!!!);

• teens who read the novel Dracula along with Quincie, looking for clues;

• readers literally bouncing, tearing up, or kneeling with enthusiasm;

• and a seemingly endless array of folks (of both genders and, for that matter, all ages) swooning over the glory that is Zachary. It’s surreal to be gushed at about the sexiness of a figment of your imagination.

So now I have my audience in mind: Geeky but unpretentious young people (and those young at heart) with depth and a sense of humor. Those who’re willing to be challenged by the occasional unfamiliar literary device and/or reconsider their world view, who’re open to a hero who’s Asian or Latino or Italian-American or gay or part wereotter; and who can get behind imperfect characters who love deeply but aren’t wholly defined by their respective relationship status.
 

They’re avid and reluctant readers, those who love and hate genre romance, and those who adore and abhor horror novels. They reach for mystery fiction and revel in the mysterious nature of our so-called real world. A few leave unsettled, even unsatisfied, only to return months, perhaps years, later with more life experience, typically after their first real heartbreak. 
 

At a time when there is so much economic pressure to pander, to dumb down, to revisit without reinventing, it’s important not to underestimate the  young, not to cower in the face of the perceived market or even some teens’ ever-evolving (and occasionally appalling) priorities.

And we must be equally wary of the temptation to preen over our craft, over how we express ourselves, if it’s at the expense of saying something that truly matters to our intended audience. Art should be thrilling, satisfying, and yes, unsettling. To the reader and also to the artist. There are no safe spaces. Joyful innovation doesn't come from playing it safe. But it does spring, at least in part, from valuing its intended audience.

[Uma] Thank you Cynthia. And so to the menu. Here's the antipasto, the trailer of Diabolical. Congratulations!



Note: Cynthia is now working on Smolder, which is set in the Tantalize universe, but begins a new arc and features new protagonists, two of whom were previously introduced as secondary characters. Cynthia Leitich Smith blogs at Cynsations and is on the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program in Writing for Children and Young Adults.

Best Endeavo(u)r

This was the first book I ever owned, and I won it.

It had been a rough year in kindergarten. I started out in one school where Anita with the pigtails stole my lunch regularly and threatened to beat me if I told. Then I moved to another school and thought I was in heaven. I loved the big pieces of paper we got to draw on and often got into trouble for using more than my allotted number of sheets.

School opened up worlds to me. One time I didn't hear the end of day bell due to being deep in conversation with a girl named Ritu about the possibility of scaling the tamarind tree. I missed the bus, and my mother had to drive all the way out from Delhi Cantonment to come and fetch me home. Come to think of it, I often lived on the fringes of reality, a little abstracted, caught up in daydreams. Their possibilities were so much more enticing than the day to day.

So when the end of year awards ceremony rolled around and came to a clacking stop, I didn't expect anything. When my name was called I sat there astonished. "Go," said my mother. "Go." In the end my father had to hold my hand and walk me up, because I was so convinced there had been some mistake.

But there it was. The Three Little Kittens, in soft colored soft-cover, kittens and mittens and mother cat and all. My own book. Mine. It said so.

I read those kittens several hundred times, from mishap to mishap. I myself had regularly lost earrings, lunch boxes, and even once a shoe.

I still have this book. It's a little moth-eaten but it has managed to hold together. The label inside reads: Prize presented to…and then my name. Underneath it says, For Best Endeavour. I don't remember what I did to earn that consolation prize. But really, as a goal, best endeavor isn't so bad. It still holds up. It's something to reach for.

Beyond Visual Literacy

There's been a lot of talk about the demise of the picture book. Parent Tracy Grant summarized the heated debate in this piece in the Washington Post. Maurice Sendak chimed in to say that the picture book is blighted by misguided notions of childhood innocence, although he admits at the same time that he hasn't read very many lately. Some of us who watched the National Book Awards streaming from New York recently were a little perturbed by celebrity writer John Lithgow's attempts to be funny. In the process of self-deprecation he managed to dismiss the entire form of the picture book by suggesting it wasn't "real."

Is it, as Karen Lotz, Candlewick publisher suggests in the NYT article that started the brouhaha, a matter of the picture book being an analog artifact in a digital age? I'm not so sure. The codex book might be analog in structure but the picture book, if we pay attention to how young children "read" it, is far from analog in application.

Adults may read it from front to back and left to right but look at this child poised to turn a page.

Left? Right? Depends? If the book topples and ends up upside down in the process, a two-year-old might continue "reading" it that way. Nothing linear about that.

Toddlers react to the whole book as an object, without privileging the words on the page. They also react to the voice and the presence of an adult reading to them. They memorize text (another skill we tend not to privilege for some odd reason) and will often catch the lazy adult reader trying to flip two pages at once. Young children will want to visit a beloved book over and over, as they define it for themselves auditorily and visually, finding comfort in prediction. And of course they will imitate the reading behaviors (or lack thereof) of the adults in their lives. In all these ways, the picture book is meant to be a multi-sensory experience.

Its future is obviously tied up with the future of the book itself. But as with hybrid cars, we haven't quite found the right combination of green, cheap, tough, and accessible, not yet. Meanwhile, the codex book with pictures continues to allow children to acquire meaning in the often ambiguous spaces between text and image, and to do so with their entire bodies, which is what young children need to do. Speculating on causation in a narrative is a very different skill from touching a screen to create it. The two are not interchangeable, nor is one better than the other. But they are different.

If we let the picture book slip away while we dither around trying to decide if the form is dead, then the thing we may be endangering is the potential of the young child's brain to take in multiple stimuli, find meaning, react with all senses at once, and thereby create the active engagement with the world that we call literacy.

Note: This post appears simultaneously on Write at Your Own Risk, the VCFA faculty blog.