After I wrote my previous post, I realized that it wasn’t telling the whole story about why I decided to start this Substack. So what did it leave out?
What I describe in that first post is what I understand to be the scholarly agenda for this ongoing discussion of children and poetry: how it relates to and emerges from my previous work as a children’s literature scholar, and why raising and trying to explore these questions seems to me to be a logical and necessary addition to my previous work. But what it leaves out are my personal reasons for deciding to tackle that now, in 2024. I’ve been thinking of what I’m doing here as a necessary addition to The Hidden Adult, a book published in 2008—sixteen years ago. Why did I choose to work on making that addition now, so many years after the theoretical work it relates to?
The honest truth is that I made the choice mainly because it gave me something scholarly to work on. Let me explain.
For the last few years I’ve been engaged in a consideration of how children’s picture books about art museums and the kinds of art they display invite children to understand what the art and the museums are and how to interact with them. I began thinking about these matters after volunteering as a guide and docent, first at the Winnipeg Art Gallery and in the last eight years at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia here in Halifax. I began volunteering as a way of getting away from my computer and having more interactions with actual living human beings, and I chose the art museums as a place to accomplish that because Word about Pictures, my 1988 book about how children’s picture books tell stories, had required me to do research in art history and art criticism that I thought might be a useful resource in guiding museum visitors. It was. Not surprisingly, then, after experiencing enjoyable and stimulating discussion with museum visitors, I found myself thinking about how children’s picture books represent museum art and, especially, museum visits. I discovered around three hundred pictures books relating to these matters and published in the last three or so decades, and I then proposed a book about my response to those books to Bloomsbury Academic. The editors of the Research in Illustration series there invited me to submit a manuscript, accepted the manuscript, slotted the book for publication in November of this year, and have announced it as forthcoming on the Bloomsbury website:
Representations of Art and Art Museums in Children's Picture Books
But after signing the contract and submitting the manuscript, I felt strangely bereft. It took me a while to figure out why; and then I realized that it was the first time since I was a college student half a century earlier that I didn’t have some sort of project relating to literature on the go.
As an undergrad English major, the projects were essays about various authors—as were the assignments I did as an English lit grad student. After that, the projects became my attempts to develop ways of encouraging students to develop interesting and enjoyable interactions with the literature I was asking them to read; and then, eventually, I produced the various essays and books, most about children’s literature, that I began to work on to better understand what I was trying to teach my students and what my students were teaching me. And while I retired from my teaching position in 2005, I had continued to work on and publish research—including, three years after my retirement, The Hidden Adult, and then, nine years after that, a book about children’s novels with alternating narratives:
And then, after that, came the project about art and art museums that Bloomsbury will be publishing.
And then, after that, came . . . .
Nothing. Zilch. Zero.
To understand why that bothered me so much, you need to know that I am one of what appears to be an exceedingly rare breed: I thoroughly enjoy doing academic research and writing about literature—maybe because it’s one of the few things I’ve even been even moderately good at, but mainly because I find interacting with literature and exploring how and what it encourages me to think about it and in response to it deeply satisfying. I like doing it. It’s fun.
And now, it seemed to me a few months ago, I was deprived of the satisfaction of doing it. I had no project to be satisfied by.
And that was when I thought about my neglect of poetry in The Hidden Adult. So yes, it’s an academic project with the academic justifications I outlined in my previous post. But it became that as the lifesaver that has rescued me from academic nothingness. I move forward with the hope that it will be an academic something. Exactly what sort of something I don’t know yet.