Writers Who Teach: Lessons from Margaret
Wise Brown
by Uma Krishnaswami
Writing for young people requires a keen understanding of
audience. Writers differ in the extent to which they actively visualize
potential readership during the writing process. Many hold that the story
comes first, and consideration of audience only second. Yolen (1991)
says she writes to the child she was. And yet, at some point during
the writing and editorial processes, certain questions must be taken into
account that might appear less literary than educational: Who is the
reader? How old? How informed on the subject of this work?
Such questions are not new. They were asked in the 1930s by legendary
children’s writer Margaret Wise Brown.
In the world of children’s books, Brown was both innovator and catalyst.
Unlike some of her contemporaries, such as Ludwig Bemelmans and Robert McCloskey,
who began as illustrators and then started writing in order to have books
to illustrate, Brown was primarily a picture book writer. Her legacy
is that she stretched and enriched the form of the picture book, writing
for the very youngest children (Marcus, 1992). But in the intersection
of her teaching and writing life are ideas that both teachers and writers
might do well to reflect upon.
As a writer, Brown sometimes shared with children the stories
she was writing. As an editor, she was assigned to work on a manuscript
written by no less a personage than Gertrude Stein. Brown took the
work in progress to expert consultants–the children of the Bank Street School.
She read it to them and noted in detail their comments and reactions, taking
those back to Harper and Row in order to best prepare the work for publication.
The Bank Street School of Education, where Margaret enrolled
in 1935, combined developmental research, teacher training, and nursery-level
education. Schooled in the thinking of William James and guided by the relativistic
“modern” ideals of Bank Street director Lucy Sprague Mitchell, Margaret’s
enchantment with children and their minds was to continue through her writing
life. The Bank Street Writers Laboratory was also born under the aegis
of Lucy Mitchell, who saw Margaret’s blossoming talent as the opportunity
to create a group within the school whose members would focus primarily on
cultivating their own skills as writers.
Mitchell believed that developing skills for authorship would
give the writers’ group, and therefore the school, a chance to directly influence
the emerging children’s publishing market. By focusing on the immediacy
of children’s feelings and needs, she hoped the group would create writers
who could lead the trend away from the then predominant fairy tales and classical
literature, toward more “here and now” books.
The question of audience is still us. Speaking for contemporary
children’s writers of our time, Mem Fox (2001, p. 6) asks, “So whom are we
writing for?” She says that when she is in the thrall of the creation
of story, the only figure she can allow to remain in the room with her (having
banished all others–parents, teachers, librarians, editors, illustrators,
critics) is the lone archetypal child reader. It is that connection
with the elemental child that Olga Litowinsky (2000) refers to when she urges
writers to avoid being SCAD (Sentimental, Condescending, cloyingly Anthropomorphic,
and Didactic).
Many children’s authors today visit schools and speak to students
and teachers about their work. Writers and illustrators also present
at educational conferences and conventions such as the National Council of
Teachers of English, the American Library Association, and others.
Thus the educational professionals who form a large part of the consumer
market for children’s books are afforded the opportunity to gain insights
into the processes by which these books are created. These experiences
are good introductions to the process of writing in the real-world scenario
of the children’s book market. But often they lack depth, and they
fail to honor young people as emerging writers.
One way to extend and enrich the author visit is to shift the focus
of its interaction. Concentrating on the visiting writer’s books or
life necessarily distances the audience and places the writer in an exalted
“author” position. Instead, looking to Margaret Wise Brown’s example,
we might ask the question: what would happen if we restructured these
“show-and-tell” sessions to focus instead on writing, or in the early grades
story? Then writer and students work together, reading and writing over a
few days, or at scheduled intervals over a few weeks to an entire school
term, around themes related in some way to the visiting writer’s published
work or writing interests. Both students and writer then examine, in
this studio environment, the development of writing–as process, as possible
outcome, and as shared experience.
While the logistics of planning and coordinating such an experience
are considerably greater than those involved in organizing a single author
visit, community linkages and grant opportunities exist that can provide
support to a school interested in a richer, longer-term relationship with
community writers (Krishnaswami, 2002). Using writers as teachers and
consultants in this way would recapture the connection between text and potential
audience that is such an integral part of the history of both children’s
books and of progressive American education. Not all children’s authors
will be comfortable in this role, but those who are will offer depth and
perspective to the workshop-based writing classroom, with writers, students,
and teachers forging new and creative partnerships. Margaret Wise Brown,
who pushed some creative boundaries of her own, would surely have approved.
References
Fox, M. (2001). So whom are we writing for? Bookbird,
39(4), 2001.
Krishnaswami, U. (2002). Beyond the field trip: Teaching and
learning in public places. North Haven, CT: Linnet Professional Publications.
Litowinsky, O. (2001). It’s a bunny-eat-bunny world.
New York: Walker and Company.
Marcus, L. (1992). Awakened by the moon. Boston:
Beacon Press.
Yolen, J. (1991). Guide to writing for children.
Boston: The Writer, Inc.
