Creative Writing at Colby   

What Writers Read Their Children (2002)

When my son was three months old, my husband and I bought a farmhouse in Maine. Early into my motherhood, I went into the library of our new town and asked the librarian about what books might be good for a one-year-old. The librarian looked at me strangely then pointed to the room to her right. "The children's books are over there," she offered.

"Oh," I nodded, as if I had thought the slim volumes under the sailboat mobile were something else. "Thanks."

My mother was briefly a children's librarian, and she had always led me to good titles when I was a girl. It didn't occur to me that all children's librarians might not be equally happy to do so.

So I found my way to books the way I suppose most people do ... by starting with the books I had loved as a child, and then asking other mothers for advice. I don't know why it took me so long to do the same thing for children's books that I do for adult books. Ask my writer friends. It makes sense to ask people who know a bit about narrative what's good, what they read (or are reading) their children.   Here six different authors -- three men, three women -- answer the question.

Suzanne Berne
A frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review and Travel Section, Suzanne Berne is the author of two novels--A Crime in the Neighborhood, which won Great Britain's prestigious Orange Prize, and A Perfect Arrangement. She lives near Boston with her husband and two daughters, Avery (7) and Louisa (5).
            
The books my children love--and the books that have survived in my dwindling memory bank--all seem to have subversive characters. The Madeline books, for instance, which showcase that adorable little French girl, who is forever sticking her tongue out at tigers and almost drowning in the Seine. My kids also love anything by James Marshall--the George and Martha books are their particular favorites. Marshall always makes the most humdrum event--going for a walk, having a substitute teacher--into a bizarre occasion. They've also loved Beverly Cleary's Ramona series and the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books, and anything by that hilarious oddball Robert Munsch. Their favorite of his books is The Paperbag Princess, where a princess saves a prince from a terrible dragon, and he's not grateful enough (in fact he criticizes her outfit), so she decides not to marry him. Lately they've liked the Roald Dahl books, which are perhaps the most subversive books ever written.

Children are drawn to characters who act out. My girls especially like mild-mannered subversives, characters who are going about their business and suddenly their world is turned upside down. Or, usually on a whim, the characters turn their world upside down. But most of all, my girls like bad behavior. In the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books, for example, the stories all involve children who are misbehaving or who are incredibly obnoxious, and their parents don't know what to do, so they send them to Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, for a cure. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle is this funny old widow whose house happens to be upside down. She prescribes a remedy for the offending child, who lies, or brags, or sleeps late every morning, or won't clean his room. Only her cure makes the child worse. It enormously exaggerates the bad behavior, so the child is appalled at what he or she has become, and has to figure out a way back into society. Sort of a pediatric law of similars.

That's actually a typical pattern: someone finds herself outside of society, either ejected (as in Where the Wild Things Are) or she gets left behind or lost in some way, and then she has to find a way back in. Look at Madeline. She gets kidnapped by gypsies or something along those lines, but by the end of the book, she and those twelve little girls in two straight lines are back in bed and Miss Clavell is bidding them goodnight. In children's books, normalcy returns at the end. Weird behavior or strange events do not have lasting consequences.

Cleary's Ramona Quimby is another good example. No matter what confusion Ramona gets into, by the end she's figured it all out. That's the key in children's books, the character has to figure things out. Which makes perfect sense. Children are deeply engaged in trying to understand how to live in the world--this enormously complex world--and they're hoping that the mistakes they make along the way aren't going to matter. (Unfortunately, those mistakes do matter, but they don't need to know that yet.) This is why my girls always want me to tell them stories about when I was young--always about me doing something wrong, me getting into trouble, me having no friends or prospects. I think they want the survivor's tale. They're thinking, "Somehow she made it through childhood. How on earth did she do it?"

Carolyn Ferrell
Carolyn Ferrell's first collection of fiction, Don't Erase Me (Houghton Mifflin), won the 1997 Los Angeles Times' Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, as well as the Ploughshares/John C. Zacharis Award for a first book. Stories from the collection have been anthologized in The Best American Stories, Children of the Night: The Best Stories by Black Writers and The Best American Short Stories of the Century. A former Fulbright Scholar, violinist, and director of a family literacy program in the South Bronx, Ferrell currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. She lives with her husband, Linwood, and two children, Benjamin (4), and Karina (three months old).

I was thinking about what the most important books for Benjamin were. Mother Goose, at first. He loved books with animals as characters, and I had a version of Mother Goose that was in a little suitcase that could snap shut. Then his favorite book was one entitled The Truck Book, a book of poems about trucks. We read that so many times that Ben memorized it. He also really liked a book of German children's songs that my aunt had given us. Each song came with a little picture of animals. Ezra Jack Keats's Whistle for Willy was another favorite, as was Richard Scarry's Cars and Trucks and Things that Go. Then my mother made some books about Benjamin. She took photographs, made up a story, and laminated the pages. One of the books--Grandma, Can We Go to the Beach?-is about Benjamin at the various beaches we go to, playing with horseshoe crabs, swimming, and watching the waves. Another is about being in Grandma's backyard, and all the fun he has there. Now the early reader books are Benjamin's big thing. He likes to read words like "emergency" and "police." In addition, he likes one of the early readers about cats called Country Cats, City Cats. Next to cars and trucks and the beach, cats are Benjamin's passion.

C.J. Hribal
A Wisconsin native, C.J. Hribal has worked as a garbageman, a hotel desk clerk, a cookie salesman, and a bookstore clerk. His first collection, Matty's Heart, was selected for a New Voices Award and was published by New Rivers Press in 1984, when Hribal was only 26. Since then, Hribal's published the novel American Beauty and edited The Boundaries of Twilight: Czecho-Slovak Writing from the New World. His collection The Clouds of Memphis won the 1999 Associated Writing Programs Award in Short Fiction. He is currently completing a novel titled Company Car. Hribal is a professor of English at Marquette University and a member of the fiction faculty at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. He has three children: two boys, Tosh and Roman (15 and 11, respectively) and a girl, Hania (8).

One of the things we've discovered is that as I read to the next kid down, the older one listens and rediscovers books they've set aside. Now we're doing The Lord of the Rings out loud, and Tosh, my oldest, will cock an ear and listen while I'm reading to the younger two. We've also done The Hobbit, The Phantom Tollbooth, Wind in the Willows, and The Chronicles of Narnia that way. We did all the Harry Potters out loud, too. Tosh discovered the first one when it was still just kids handing the book to each other and saying, "You've got to read this." We would usually read 20 or so pages a night. By the time we got to the fourth book, though, my two youngest were so into the story that I had to finish the last 150 pages in one sitting. I started at 7 p.m. and finished around 11:30--my voice was shot. But they simply wouldn't let me put that book down.

When I started reading to my kids, I read books that I had liked, either as a kid or while I was in a store browsing--books like the Bill and Pete series (about a crocodile and his "toothbrush"--a bird named Pete) and Harold and the Purple Crayon.   And then we added in books that they discovered or that we were given: Barry Lopez's Crow and Weasel or a story from El Salvador called The Magic Dogs of the Volcanoes.   Earlier on we did a lot of Babar books, Stuart Little, Winnie the Pooh. We also read a lot of The Magic School Bus books--the original ones by Joanna Cole, not the knockoffs associated with the animated series. They all feature Miss Frizzle, an outrageous teacher who wears funky dresses, earrings and shoes, all of which match whatever the class is studying that week. Before the kids go on a field trip, they have to work like crazy; you get reproductions of their reports in the margins, their dioramas and posters and class projects, and all sorts of interesting sidebars. Then Miss Frizzle takes them on a broken down bus that magically transports them to the place that they're studying--be it underneath the ocean, out in space, at a city's waterworks, or on a madcap journey through pre-history. She pretends when they return, it didn't happen: "No, no, we didn't do that, you just imagined that." Mary Poppins as a rigorous but whacked out science teacher. Very early on, when we were doing the picture books (especially the Richard Scary alphabet books featuring Lowly Worm and his buddies), my wife went through the books with a marker and wrote in the Polish words for all the objects as well. Which was one of the ways the kids learned to speak Polish. Now Krys talks to them in Polish, and I speak to them in baby Polish, which comes in handy when you want to call them or reprimand them for something. People around us might know they're getting called on the carpet, but at least they don't know about what.

Robert Cohen
Robert Cohen is the author of the novels The Organ Builder, The Here and Now, and Inspired Sleep, as well as the short story collection The Varieties of Romantic Experience. His work has been awarded a Whiting Writers' Award, a Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Writers Award, The Ribalow Prize and a Pushcart Prize. He teaches at Middlebury College and lives in Vermont with his wife, Claudia, and his stepson, Nick (15), and his son, Eli (10).

Eli's first favorite book was Baby Ben's Go-Go Book, and I remember nothing about it save for his sheer delight in it. We probably read it ten times a day for the first year of his life. He always had a tremendous appetite for sitting still and listening to books, a longer appetite than most. I remember when Eli was four, my wife read the entire C.S. Lewis series to him, and he never got tired of it, and he was really too young to absorb that long of an epic. Also, the first year and a half of his life, I was more the house parent. Claudia was working, and I think Eli learned pretty early on that the one way he would unfailingly get my attention was to bring me a book. If he brought me anything else to play with, I might say no, but I never said no when he brought me a book, so it may have been behavioral conditioning that made books an automatic gratification. Then when he was two and three, we had a huge number of books. He really liked a book called Tacky the Penguin, about a penguin in an ugly Hawaiian shirt who didn't fit in with the other penguins. Your basic tale of a non-conformist penguin. At a certain point, hunters come, and Tacky's off-key singing and obnoxiousness is what saves all the penguins. There's also a really great post-modern book called It was a Dark and Stormy Night. It's like a children's book written by Italo Calvino. It's a story about pirates, but the conceit of the book is that the characters of the story keep interrupting the narrator. It's very funny and full of wit.

Now, Eli's a totally voracious reader. He really loves sci-fi and fantasy. He ate up Tolkein, and a series called Redwall by a writer named Brian Jacques. Redwall is like Tolkein; it's loosely considered fantasy, about magical worlds inhabited by animals. They are thick volumes, and a year or so ago, Eli tore his way through all 14 volumes and then re-read each book about five times. Now he's doing that with an adult fiction writer, Orson Scott Card. He really likes that stuff. He read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In fact, my wife would like to get him back into her main interest ... which is realistic, young adult fiction. She worries that he's so into these alternative worlds, but I think this stuff is very rich. I was into it when I was in high school. Eli asks a lot of question and makes a lot of connections because of those books. Like: "Why didn't Germany invade Switzerland in World War II? In Redwall, they don't honor neutrality."

Nick went through a period of being a reader, but he can't read in car the way Eli can. Nick at the age of 15 is super-bright, but he doesn't read for pleasure. If he is launched into a book and feels a connection to it, he'll tear through it, but it takes him forever to get to it. He's not one of these kids who always needs to have a book going, and Eli is. It's his default mode.

David Shields
David Shields is the author of three works of fiction (Dead Languages, Heroes, and a Handbook for Drowning), as well as four books of nonfiction, Black Planet (a finalist for the National Book critics Circle Award), Remote, Enough About You and "Baseball is Just Baseball": The Understate Ichiro. He and his wife live with their daughter, Natalie (9), in Seattle, where he is a professor in the English Department at the University of Washington.

Right now, Natalie's reading The Lemony Snickett series. Lemony Snickett is a series about the Baudelaire family. They're three orphaned kids, and they undergo various terrible adventures as they try to find a home to live in. They get handed off to Count Olaf, a distant cousin who is an utter ogre. A middle class kid can read it from the safety point of her ensconced home and love the characters' flawed life. Daniel Harris has an essay about cuteness in which he says that anything that is cute is kind of damaged. What kids love about something that's cute is that they can love it to health. Kids then feel powerful. In their ordinary lives, kids are constantly condescended to, so it's important that they can reverse things. I see that as the governing principle of a lot of books that appeal to kids—that you're wishing for these characters to survive and that you comfort yourself that you're not in such horrible circumstances.

Of late, when we're reading to her, it's been Huck Finn. We also read her essays and stories that I see from colleagues and students--like an essay a former student essay wrote about being on "The Weakest Link" and poems on subjects she might find amusing, (like a poem by Roger Fanning about a large lady's underwear.)

The grad student who was on "The Weakest Link" mailed us a videotape of her appearance on show and then sent the essay she wrote, so I read it to my daughter. I try to make these connections for her, to make it clear that you can write about anything that happens to you. I try to show her that writing comes from lived life and that it is a natural response to experience.

Antonya Nelson
The New Yorker recently picked Antonya Nelson as one of "Twenty Writers for the Twenty First Century." She is the author of four short story collections (The Expendables, In the Land of Men, Family Terrorists, and Female Trouble) and three novels (Talking in Bed, Nobody's Girl, and Living to Tell). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Redbook, TriQuarterly, Story, and many other magazines, as well as in anthologies such as the O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. She is married to the writer Robert Boswell and has two children, Jade (15) and Noah (11).

All three of us enjoyed things like Pooh--the real Winnie the Pooh--where the writer is well-aware of needing to entertain at two levels, to engage the adult and the child. Nicholson Baker's book The Everlasting Story of Nory has that wry, British charm. Baker doesn't dumb things down. He gives the kids some less than pleasant qualities. Same thing with Eloise where the writer isn't sugarcoating or failing to acknowledge dark impulses or less than charitable qualities. And that--for whatever reason--I really appreciate. One of the great things about The Wind in the Willows is the way that the characters' flaws become so person-like and charming. In Pooh, Eeyore and Owl's personalities come through so clearly; they seem like flawed but really funny characters.

I really like a couple of those Dr. Seuss books. Like Go, Dog, Go, just because it has a dry humor that comes through in the syntax, episodes and drawings. There's one in the Sneetches book ["What Was I Scared Of?"] about a pair of pale green pants with nobody inside them. That's hilarious. Something in me and the kids like vaguely humorous and twisted stories.   We've sort of got an Edmund Gorey sensibility. My kids like the cleverness of the Roald Dahl stories where bad things happen to bad characters. They like that Matilda in Matilda gets to act out her evil thoughts, that she gets revenge. That's very satisfying for kids. No one in the world will go out and take care of those problems for you, but Matilda suggests you get to do it yourself. Same thing in Eloise. All those horrible bratty things she does in that hotel; all those things you're told not to do. Which look like a lot of fun. That's what I'd do if I was a kid ... be a brat.