Please don’t judge me, but in March 2020, when I moved across the country, I removed six boxes of books, including many classic works of literature and non-fiction. Titles passed by Jane Austen (Northern Abbey– I would like to read again Pride and Prejudice) and Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities– no desire for the past). Moby-Dick I went (I tried for years, and failed). So did Joan Didion Political Stories and Robert Caro Power Broker (I have never been around them).
What I didn’t—and never—could—get rid of: Snow Day, Miss Rumphius, Small House, Cars and Trucks and Vehicles, Blueberries for Saland about 50 other children’s books. My copies have been with me since the 1970s and 1980s. They sit, always, in a place of honor, next to the artists’ photos and exhibition catalogs. In 1991, when I left home for college, they moved with me from Davis, California, to New York City. From the East Village they traveled to Brooklyn, then Queens, then Brooklyn again, following me on a professional (half a dozen jobs) and personal (one marriage, one divorce) trajectory. During my most recent move, cleaning out my adult library created more physical space for my first child—Caro’s books are about 20 times the width of the average Dr.’s head. Seuss—but more importantly, sifting represented the setting of priorities. Picture books took first place.
Again, I’m inclined to ask readers not to judge me. It’s self-defense based on experience: I’ve heard many people suggest that there is no way to “turn on children” in parallel with words written for adults. (At least one of Margaret Wise Brown’s contemporaries referred to her works of art-Good night, Fur subfamily– as “children’s books.”)
This kind of nonsense is what Mac Barnett, author of many children’s books—including The First Cat In Space Ate Pizza,, Jack’s book series, and Sam and Dave the Digger-calls a “literary error.” In his new book, Make Believe: On Storytelling for Children (this is for adults), Barnett writes, “When we dismiss children’s books, what we are really doing is failing to recognize children’s potential.” To this, I would add that in erasing children’s books, adults fail to realize the power of people.
Reading children’s literature as adults is not just an impulse to desire or an exercise to do in the context of sharing stories with children. Including these books in a literary diet—whether one has children or not—can help anyone see and hear with new eyes and ears, find or rediscover wonders in places large (mountain ranges, the moon) and small (a hammer, a smile, a. square) In my home office, hanging around with children’s books puts me in a state of mind that mixes and refines my ideas. Books have also pushed me towards some of my more original ideas. (I recently took a behind-the-scenes tour of the Los Angeles airport because I liked writing about how certain aspects of major airports work—here’s looking at you, Richard Scarry.)
A key concept, “childhood,” can sum up this way of feeling the world, Alison Waller, author of the 2019 book. Rereading the Books of Childhood: A Poeticshe told me. The term comes from the literary critic Peter Hollindale, who recognized “one point where the remembering adult and the remembered child can meet,” Waller writes, “and where they can actually find something to share through childhood experiences more generally.” When we spoke, he was quick to emphasize that childhood it doesn’t mean like a child. The latter, he said, has an element of judgment; the former acknowledges that for many people, childhood experiences stay with them—sometimes clearly—into adulthood. (As noted children’s editor Ursula Nordstrom said, “I’m a former child, and I haven’t forgotten a thing.”) Rereading childhood books, Waller suggested, can be a way of acknowledging that our youth is “part of a continuum of identity.”
In Do BelieveBarnett writes touchingly about the “awareness, flexibility, and open-mindedness” of a child’s mind. Children, he says, are better at pretending than adults, and may be better equipped than adults to engage deeply with stories, because they should be. Much in the world around them is new; much is possible; much of childhood is “a long series of experiments—testing hypotheses and making adjustments.”
During a recent conversation with Barnett, I began to wonder if re-reading picture books could encourage creative plasticity in adults, returning to a seemingly simpler, but perhaps more modern, way of encountering texts (and, by extension, life). Most children’s books, after all, share a great deal of logic. They can be strange, scary, sometimes unsettling. It takes a careful and sensitive mind to process that kind of wonder, to follow the nonsense of the writer or painter and suspend judgment or disbelief.
Barnett writes that one way adults “identify as adults is by rejecting the things we recently loved.” But the old man is not always wise. When we talked, he said that meeting words and images together invites people to enter the borderland. “The words do some work,” he said, “and the pictures do some work, and they create this space in between that asks the reader to step in and interpret it and understand it. They demand the active participation of the reader.” That is, children’s books awaken a part of the brain that some adults—who are busy with the daily grind of work or raising children or just living—may inadvertently allow to sleep.
This past week, I walked into Wolfcat Books, a new children’s store in Los Angeles that, when I visited, was preparing for its soft launch—although its owner, Andrea Meller, told me that she hesitates to call it a “children’s” store, because in her mind, children’s books are for everyone. (He has a quote from CS Lewis taped to his door: “One day you’ll be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”) We talked about how reading children’s books, especially picture books, can create an experience not unlike visiting an art museum—or, as Meller pointed out, working in a theater (as he once did). “You can do these wild things in the theater because it’s the moment,” Meller said. “When I found picture books again, as an adult, I felt the same freedom, where there are these rules that we think of with literature, but in picture books they are all broken. The main character can be eaten in the middle.”
Barnett writes about that kind of openness to quirk, too. “Children read without preconceived notions of what a story could be or should be,” he says in Do Believe. “An unusual design or a new approach doesn’t bother them at all.” I see the same spirit in the stories of some of my favorite writers and journalists, people who, with an infectious curiosity, attack their work with a formal innovation and enthusiasm that one might call evidence of childhood: Think John McPhee above orange; Maggie Nelson in the paint blue; AtlanticCaity Weaver is on bread.
Many picture books remind readers to be brave. And better (here I think The Giving Tree and Where the Wild Things Are) refuse to avoid some serious topics in life: love, death, loss, fear. They also encourage readers and writers to enjoy the music of words, use language in a natural way, and pay attention to the smallest details. I will never forget reading a letter, from Wise Brown’s archives at Hollins College, that he wrote to a fellow graduate. “Did you know that if you listen during the day on Fifth Avenue when the lights change and the traffic stops,” Brown said, “you can hear the sound of footsteps?”
Who says that? WHO advertisements that? An adult who can call a child happy with nonsense and surprise in every day.
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