A Glimpse of the CLISS 2: The Children's Literature Summer School and Symposium, Roehampton University, London, England. July 2003

What is CLISS? For an overview, we offer three perspectives, three voices, each offering a personal view: tutor Lissa Paul, organizer Kim Reynolds and participant Wally de Doncker. The essays in this issue offer in-depth views: close looks at the range of subjects discussed at the international gathering of children's literature specialists.

A Tutor's View: Lissa Paul

The anticipation of returning to a place where you've been happy is perhaps one way adults reconnect with childhood selves, recapturing the sense of living in the future rather than through the filters of experience and memory. My return to the Children's Literature International Summer School (CLISS, sponsored by the National Centre for Research in Children's Literature [NCRCL]) in late July 2003 felt that way. I'd been one of the first international group tutors at the first CLISS in summer 2001, and had quickly become part of the international community of students living, studying, touring, and eating together on the welcoming campus, which also houses Froebel College, named after the founder of kindergartens, Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852). Froebel believed that education should be a "creative and interactive process," so it is likely that he would have approved of the CLISS seminars taking place on the campus that week in late July.

The weather was English summer: slightly cool, but not uncomfortable. There's a lovely little pond on the grounds, with a blue heron often present. And just outside the campus walls is Richmond Park, protected in the late seventeenth century as a royal deer preserve. On one early-morning walk in the park, tutors Lynne Vallone, Peter Hunt, and I all observed a large herd of stags quietly grazing.

Inside the walls of the college, the lectures, seminars, displays, and conversations are all focused on children's literature—in an array of international aspects. One of my favorite moments from CLISS 2 occurred during a lecture by Peter Hunt on "Children's Literature and the Loss of God." Two Israeli students sitting next to me were taking notes in graceful Hebrew script in their right-to-left notebooks. Those kinds of cross-cultural moments were frequent, though ephemeral. There were, however, many more enduring cross-cultural connections with students and colleagues from Europe, North America, Asia, and the Middle East. For people like me, living in North America, children's literature by default almost always means English-language children's literature. The teeming creative and academic inventiveness alive in the rest of the world remains almost invisible, existing on the very edges of our anglophone peripheral vision. CLISS brings the children's book world of those cultures up close, and makes us rethink ourselves.

My first visit in 2001, for example, included a meeting with Anette Steffensen from Denmark, seeding the opportunity for a lecture and subsequent connection with the wonderful Centre for Children's Literature in Copenhagen—and with some of the people who have since been invited to join the editorial board of The Lion and the Unicorn, including Wally de Doncker from Belgium and Tomoko Masaki from Japan.

An Organizer's View: Kim Reynolds

The idea of running a Children's Literature International Summer School in the United Kingdom was part of a general movement in that nation to reassess the contribution made by children's literature, in all its forms, to culture. The Arts Council of England was central to this process and has helped to finance CLISS since its inception (and has contributed funds to this issue of The Lion and the Unicorn). The Literature Department there recognizes that literature for children has played a significant role in shaping aesthetic tastes, literary heritage, social mores, and attitudes to being British at least...