When Harriet M. Welsch, the best known spy and child writer in children's literature, clutches her green composition book marked" Private" and screams," I'm not playing. Who says I'm playing. I'm WORKING!" she is echoing the weary, defensive voice of endless writers. She is also, as they are, wrong. Her writing is play--the pastoral play described by minds as diverse as Elizabeth Bowen and Sigmund Freud, and experienced by all artists who feel most fully alive when creating.

Regardless of the semantic conundrum surrounding the words work and play, stories about young writers such as Harriet are dominated by pastoral metaphors, affirming their authors' vision of writing as play. This is not to say writing is free of risk or inner tension, but that it is pastoral because of them. The essence and endurance of play, as explored as Huizinga in Homo Ludens, requires the tensions and antitheses that are also the essence of the pastoral, including impulse and order, insecurity and confidence. Both play and the pastoral create order within chaos, or, in the case of the writer, literature within life.