Allingham's Old Worn Woman

This painting by Helen Allingham (1848-1926) "Old Worn Woman" reminds me of an illustration in one of Evelyn Whitaker's books or maybe its cover.
I need to follow-up. No time just now.
 A link to the blog where  I found it from the BWWA facebook group.
 https://reveriesunderthesignofausten.wordpress.com/2015/08/19/helen-allingham-1848-1926/

"Windows and Wallpaper" ChLA 1

I recently spent a delightful 5 days at Hollins University attending  ChLA; the hosts were wonderful, the sessions were educational, my fellow attendees were interesting and interested, the food was delicious, and there were fireflies at the awards banquet on the grounds of the historic quad.  All that and I got to be dorm "roomie" with Sonya Sawyer Fritz.  What fun!

Margaret Wise Brown, who graduated from Hollins in 1932, is the author of two of my favorite books (Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny)
and is being celebrated with a festival which has just opened.  The campus museum exhibit, where I spent a delightful half hour and wanted to stay the day, is Goodnight, Hush.  Classic Children's Book Illustrations. I lingered and returned again and again to the original illustrations by Clement Hurd.  Since DMP and I had a series of house bunnies spanning twenty years, I delighted in his studies of rabbits in various poses.

I also enjoyed the classic fairy tale illustrations of Ruth Sanderson and bought a copy of Papa Gatto, An Italian Fairy Tale, a Cinderella story which required no fairy godmother. 

Sanderson's illustrations are beautiful and draw one into the story.  If there had been a copy in stock I would have bought Goldilocks because the illustration reminds me of my young neighbor, Emily C.  After making my purchase, I returned to the exhibit to find the benches fully occupied by women with PhDs and tenure-track professorships.  Each had grabbed a book and settled down to read a story of her childhood. What a wonderful recess from the distractions of scholarship!

The first session on Thursday featured Children's Literature as Linguistic Play and a look at books where "conversation shapes social reality" and  I enjoyed learning about these very special children's books:  ,  David Wiesner's The Three Pigs at first seems to be the familiar story  but then the wolf huffs & puffs & blows the little pigs outside the story frame and away they go on a series of adventures (and changing illustrative style) into other story books.  It's a childhood version of Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series which neither DMP nor I can resist for a minute.

Adam Z. Dotson's presentation linked Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces which defined the monomyth and has been required reading for any serious student of literature since it was first published in 1949.  A bit of fun as Dorothy manages all 17 points of the hero's journey although Baum's work predates Campbell's by almost half a century.  If you only know the movie, you've missed much of the story although I did not much enjoy the books when I read them as a child.  

Dotson's paper was lagniappe since I chose that panel because I wanted to hear Anna Panszczyk's paper "Get Thee to a Library:  The Library Setting as a Space of Revolt and Difference in Children's Literature" and Anna did not disappoint.  The library appears as a space of "hushed tones and rigid rules" where one obtains "immediate information" but its  "organized, ordered exterior" exists "in tension with the chaos at its heart" where there is a "frenzied passion" to "collect, hoard, and devour" books.  Anna's talk featured  Library Lion and The Librarian of Basra   and one of the most delightful books I've come across, The Libraryby Sarah Stewart about a girl who would "rather read..."  That girl is a lot like the child I was and the woman I grew to be.

The day concluded with a screening of The Library of the Early Mind, a documentary film directed by Edward J. Delaney, produced by Steven Withrow, which features interviews with 50 top writers, illustrators, publishers and critics of children's literature.

{Insert many adjectives for a rave review here!}

 The interview with Daniel Handler a.k.a. Lemony Snicket is a delight!

One of the interviewees (perhaps Peter H. Reynolds) said that children's literature, "the books we read as children... give us windows and wallpaper."  I think he meant "windows" through which to look out and learn of the world and "wallpaper" with which to decorate the rooms of our minds, the images on which our inner eye dwells. 

My quirky mind was pleased at what I think was an unintended double entendre:  Windows is also an operating system and Wallpaper is the image we select for our Desktop. One cannot consider books, reading, information, libraries without considering the changes that technology and digitization are bringing. 
Quoting my friend Luci's blog:  "...if you're a teacher... start imagining how you can transition your classroom to a multi-media, online format. don't worry, your organization's LMS should be a great help, and you can shoot for gradual blended learning if the online component freaks you out. but buck up, soldier - the technology is here to stay, people are already drawn to it, and it can add a lot of options to your class to help different kinds of learners, so make friends with the computer and let it help us turn out critical thinkers who're actively participating in their educations."

ChLA to be continued...

Once upon a time...

I love fairy tales.  I have always loved fairy tales.

Since one of my current interests is children's literature, I'm getting to revisit my own childhood reading. A couple of months ago I read Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know by Hamilton Wright Mabie, Doubleday, 1905. Kindle.  Link: Project Gutenberg books by Mabie

When I was in the 3rd & 4th grades--yes, two grades in the same classroom, at the same time, with one teacher--there was a bookshelf along the back filled mostly with volumes of  fairy tales.  I especially remember The Golden Book of Fairy Tales, translated (from the French) by Marie Ponsot and illustrated by Adrienne Ségur.  Link:  Terri Windling's tribute Segur  The book, published in 1957, was well worn when I first saw it 1959 and it was one of the few on the shelf that I actually had to share with my classmates.  When I thought I could get away with it, I hid the book in my desk and read it or studied the illustrations when I finished Mrs. Vardeman's boring lists of glossary words that we were forced to copy into notebooks. Seeing little use to copy things that I could look up in a dictionary, I was already in training to become a reference librarian.

I was fascinated by the various printed versions of Snow White.  I became interested in the transitions that stories undergo from generation to generation, and from story to book to movie.  Walt Disney's  Snow White (I secretly thought she should skip the prince and the palace and stay at the lovely little house in the woods with the animals) and Fantasia (which I credit for my first experience of classical music) were and perhaps still are my favorite movies.  Mrs. Vardeman also had us listen to music while we used Crayolas to "draw what the music makes you feel."   For a brief tour of comparative fairy tale illustrations visit  more fairy tale illustrations & illustrators

One of my rediscovered delights is Der Struwwelpeter.  Heinrich Hoffman (1809-1894) who wrote and illustrated the book in December 1844 as a gift for his three-year-old son.  Link: illustrated Project Gutenberg Struwwelpeter  You may notice a resemblance between Hoffman's drawing of Straw Peter and the movie character of Edward Scissorhands, a movie fairy tale which is evocative of numerous other fairy tales and movies.  "Children are bewitched by this book because it challenges them in ways that adults can no longer fathom nor recall. Struwwelpeter stands or falls on the credo that children can bear to be scared by art and thereby grow."  Link: review of the new Dover edition by Ellen Handler Spitz in The New Republic

Der Struwwelpter is one of several books that Evelyn Whitaker mentions in her novels.  In Gay, [Little Brown, W.R. Chambers, 1903] Oliver Bruce is writing a book "...in London he would be more within reach of books of reference, and be able to consult authorities, and get in touch with those strange and mysterious powers, the publishers, of whom Mrs. Bruce spoke with bated breath, dimly imagining them to resemble Great Agrippa in Struwwelpeter with his gigantic ink-pot." 

I remember being very pleased with the Great Agrippa illustrations.  The story spoke to issues of racial equality which, even as a child, were important to me.  I was also pleased with the ink pot since I was the proud owner of my first fountain pen and ink bottle with which I wrote Mrs. Vardeman's lists in a blotty cursive that was never up to her standards of penmanship.  Hoffman's The Story of the Inky Boys is undoubtedly referenced when later in the book the children, Gay and Do, put a poppy flower in Oliver's ink pot. "...the two children always called his flat the Ogre's Den, and Oliver surmised that the festive mother might have encouraged the idea... The children had added on their own horrifying and blood curdling details selected from Jack the Giant Killer, with a flavour of the Three Bears."

Lovers of fairy tales will fairy tale illustrations will want to take a peek at Neil Gaiman:  Instructions.  Everything you'll need to know on your journey by, illustrated by Charles Vess, Harper-Collins.  The book was first published as A Wolf at the Door, Simon & Schuster, 2000.  Vess dedicates to the above mentioned Terri Windling. A reviewer has called it "how to survive a fairy tale" but I think it could as easily be called "how to survive life."  "Trust dreams.  Trust your heart, and trust your story."
From "once upon a time" to "happily ever after" this is the life I read...

March Memoir...

When March comes in whether lion or lamb, I remember Mrs. Hewitt, my first & second grade teacher.  Her birthday was March 8th and for decades I never failed to send her a card (at Christmas, too) until her sister wrote me a few years ago that she was no longer able to see the cards or know that she was remembered. 

Here is a photo of the class with Mrs. Hewitt. 

I am the second grader on the top row left wearing the corduroy  dress with white PeterPan collar.

Here is the first grade photo with Mrs. Hewitt absent;

substituting  was Ruby Lee Higginbotham who later worked as the school janitor and our bus driver.  Tommy is the boy with glasses on the top row (he scooched down so he wouldn't be "too tall")

 and I'm standing in front of him.

Some years ago I wrote a memoir about her for a tribute to teachers sponsored by Borders Books. Sibyl Hewitt--I remember her hands at www.gather.com
That memoir dealt with her classroom and a special needs student, Tommy. But there is a sense in which every student has special needs.

I was in all her reading groups and when I read with the top group, "my" group, she never corrected my pronunciation. In the other groups we worked on my speech disorder--both a stutter and the inability to sound "s" when it came before a hard consonant. By the end of first grade, my speech was near normal. When we read aloud, she discouraged "calling words" and taught us "deportment" and "projection" and "inflection."

Teaching two grades at the same time while attending to the needs of gifted and special needs and non-english speaking students required much creativity in creating a willingness in all her students.  She bribed us. While Tommy had his time at the sandbox to keep him happy, other students had special work sheets and opportunities to color and do paper art. I did art only when it was required. My reward was my desk next to a bookshelf filled with books which I could explore when I finished my work.
She often used older or gifted students to help with the younger or those with needs. While a second grader, I sacrificed "my reading time" to sit at a desk with a tiny first grader who spoke no English. I had a bowl of candies (little multi-colored gummy things the size of minature marshmallows) which I dispensed to the little girl as we completed each page in her primer. When she went to her reading group she could read aloud like everyone else. Throughout the day other students engaged her one-on-one with jacks or crayons or girls-only sandbox. By the end of the first six weeks, she had learned a lot of English and made a lot of friends.
Long before there were "educators" and "mandates" and "in-service" ad inf. there were teachers.
Mrs. Hewitt was one of the best and in her class room there was no child left behind.

This Norman Rockwell illustration for the Saturday Evening Post (1946) evokes Mrs. Hewitt's classroom with some differences:  our stove was black and in the corner, our windows looked out onto a playground and the flat Panhandle plains, and we all wore shoes.

This illustration is from one of my favorite books:  The Faith of America illustrated by Norman Rockwell.  Text by Fred Bauer.  New York:  Artabras, 1980.  An excellent way to explore American history is through periodical art.  The following link has this photo in better color:  see more Norman Rockwall illustrations