The Invisible Child

Paterson, Katherine. "In Search of Wonder." In The Invisible Child: On Reading and Writing Books for Children. New York: Dutton Children's Books, 2001.

"I fed upon wonder as a child, and when I'm deprived of it, my inner life feels as sterile as a barren landscape and my outer life feels as bombarded with junk as a suburban mall."

Katherine Paterson's opening chapter is taken from a lecture on wonder that reads like a sermon without duty to any particular religion; it is a taxonomy of the different flavours of wonder - curiosity, wonder at the extraordinary, wonder at the ordinary - and an exploration of the role wonder plays in our lives, with a gentle nod towards the mystery at the core of wonder. And the bent of this talk it that children's literature, the stuff that really shines, is rich with it. Is, in fact, defined by it.

I appreciated the differentiation between the wonder at the extraordinary - the new invention, the unbelievable message in Charlotte's Web, the thrill of faster, louder, more exciting - which pales with familiarity, and the wonder at the ordinary which continues to expand and unfold with careful attention paid to even the most familiar object. Look no further than Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden for that heightened sense of magic and wonder in what is so easily ignored.

Paterson uses the image of the spider web to talk about wonder, and visits it from different angles - from Charlotte's Web to the poetry of A.R. Ammon. I love the idea of the web as precisely patterned in the centre to reflect the species of the maker-spider, and moving out in increasing chaos towards a complete freedom to hang itself from whatever is available. Is that what children's literature aims to do? Hang itself, so improbably at times, from whatever is available while starting from a tightly woven core of wonder as individual as the maker.

This is a beautiful talk about a topic essential to any consideration of children's literature. If you haven't already - read it.

Paterson, Katherine. "Newberry Medal Acceptance Speech (1978) for Bridge to Terabithia. " In The Invisible Child: On Reading and Writing Books for Children. New York: Dutton Children's Books, 2001.

I didn't mean to start reading this speech, but suddenly I found I'd accidentally finished it and was surprised at how moved I was by the story of what this book was born out of and how it came into the world. I'm still shocked to hear that some critics find it devoid of hope simply because it deals with the unthinkable death of a child. But just as courage isn't the absence of fear but the willingness to face it, isn't hope something more than the absence of difficulty? Isn't it, in fact, something that depends of the presence of difficult circumstances for its very existence?

I was also fascinated to hear about the very substantial process of editing, to re-discover how involved a good editor can be in the act of creation. But I think what moved me the most was to hear how real the story was for the writer, and how difficult it was for her to write the difficult parts - to me this seems like the antipathy of condescension, the ultimate show of respect for the child reader.