Limitless Wonder of Story

When Katherine Paterson tells the listener that she "want[s] to talk about story" (49), she sounds a theme that resonates in almost every lecture in this celebratory collection. Maurice Sendak's lecture strings together powerful anecdotes, stories that serve to inspire him; Robert Cormier tells a story about himself as an eleven-year-old boy destined to wear blue neckties for eternity in exchange for his mother's recovered health; Paula Fox chooses to tell stories about some of the brave children she has met; Trina Schart Hyman shares a story about Leonardo da Vinci. Underlying, and central to all this tale telling, is a fundamental belief in the power of story to illuminate and transform lives.

In her warm, generous-spirited introduction, Betsy Hearne speaks no less movingly about story as "mind-saver" (ix). She credits the ten writers and artists whose words grace this volume with changing lives through their visionary ability to craft narrative and art that matters. In sharing the genesis of the lectureship, Hearne acknowledges the inestimable role of the talented, committed Zena Sutherland, whose cogent criticism and ready encouragement provided the bedrock for some of the best work in children's literature. Like the legendary Celebrating Children's Books: Essays on Children's Literature in Honor of Zena Sutherland, this collection commemorates her unparalleled leadership.

The opening essay by Maurice Sendak, filled with his characteristic passion and wit, reintroduces childhood not as a haven of security and happiness but as a "grand and terrifying and mostly uncivilized country" (3). Its province provided Sendak his originative encounters with death and loss, twin obsessions that inform much of his work. The young, impressionable Sendak was inspired by pleasures seen as well as pain felt. Collisions between the real and the imaginary, between art and life, continue to be the stuff that fuels Sendak's genius and that receives wry and poignant expansion in this inaugural essay.

Lloyd Alexander calls on his young Geraint to speak about the real and the imaginary. Meaningful sorcery, says the hero of "The True Enchanter," helps us "imagine these things [the birds, the flowers, the stars] to be more than what they are" (42). Alexander reminds us of the obligation of literature to illumine through artifice, to create the lie through which truth shines brightly. Katherine Paterson echoes Alexander's commitment to the imperative of art. In "Tell All the Truth, but Tell It Slant," Paterson turns to story for amelioration and healing. Paterson's clear, humane, impassioned voice proves the strongest defender of story as releasing the imprisoned child caught between "silence and the scream."

Virginia Hamilton continues powerful considerations of reality and illusion as she searches to create in her art the "best unreal world" (77). She challenges herself to tell the truth by always addressing the black experience rooted in struggle, in becoming, in change. Unafraid of the challenge, Hamilton follows a story's path, even into often dangerous terrain, knowing, like Paterson, that therein lies accident and surprise—liberating discovery and the possibility of "growing consciousness" (92). Robert Cormier risks the emotional costs of traveling to his younger days and sharing the formative impact of both his mother's renunciation of movie going and of his father's life and death. In "I, Too, Am the Cheese," Cormier reveals his vulnerable boy self as counterbalance to all those readers who know him as the creator of The Chocolate War.

Paula Fox documents, with crystalline precision, the bittersweet memories of her encounters with children whose fragile lives bespeak profound courage. Their stories expose the lie that children invariably lead happy lives and want happy endings. Her lecture, "Unquestioned Answers," addresses the empowerment of literature to heal by speaking truthfully and honestly about the unanswerable, the mysterious, and the unknowable. It is life's mysteries that challenge David Macaulay. Attempting to pin down the meaning of nonfiction in his...