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From: Perry Nodelman <nodelman>
Date: Mon, 21 Aug 1995 09:26:47 -0900 (PDT)
Nina Lindsay asks if these words by Nikki Giovanni represent what I had in mind last month when were discussing timelesness. I think they do, for the most part--although I'm still a little bothered by the sentence in the middle. But I do very much like "If you are specific, you will hit the heart."
I'm realizing that my thinking here is influenced by a whole set of ideas about writing from where you are that are very powerful here in my country: Canadians began to write books that interested Canadians AND others only when we stopped trying to be universal (for us, that means, mostly, American) and worked at describing the details of our own immediate lives. It turns out that these details interested Americans and Australians and even ourselves more than any attempt to blot them out into a universalized generality. And the more particular the detail the better: my own city has produced wonderful writers like Margaret Laurence and Carol Shields who are wonderfully exact about what it feels like to live here in Manitoba, in Winnipeg--so exact that it seems real to other people in other places. Consider Laurence's Stone Angel, or Shields' Republic of Love or Stone diaries.
And is it important to think about children's literature in these terms? Very much so, I think. Again, Winnipeg and other places in Manitoba and the Canadian Praries exist in a powerfully real way in children's books by Winnipeg writers Diana Wieler, Martha Brooks, Margaret Buffie, Sheldon Oberman, Carol Matas--and maybe even, I hope, Perry Nodelman?
Certainly, the setting of my book Same Place But Different--Churchill Drive Park, right across the street from my house--is very important to me in my relatonship to the story: As I wrote, I had to get all the little details right, I felt, and then the story would (and did) emerge. An important scene involves a sewer outlet in the riverbank, and I had to make a special trip down there to count the number of bolts holding its cover on so I could report them accurately in the book, and so that my characters would have to wrestle with undoing them. Once I'd done that, I figured, then people could believe that fairies might exist in the park also.
Forgive my silence this past few weeks--but I've managed to get drafts completed for two sequels--one to Same Place, and one to Of Two Minds, the YA fantasy I wrote in collaboration with Carol Matas (Simon and Schuster is publishing Of Two Minds in October).
Perry Nodelman University of Winnipeg nodelman at io.UWinnipeg.ca
Received on Mon 21 Aug 1995 01:26:47 PM CDT
Date: Mon, 21 Aug 1995 09:26:47 -0900 (PDT)
Nina Lindsay asks if these words by Nikki Giovanni represent what I had in mind last month when were discussing timelesness. I think they do, for the most part--although I'm still a little bothered by the sentence in the middle. But I do very much like "If you are specific, you will hit the heart."
I'm realizing that my thinking here is influenced by a whole set of ideas about writing from where you are that are very powerful here in my country: Canadians began to write books that interested Canadians AND others only when we stopped trying to be universal (for us, that means, mostly, American) and worked at describing the details of our own immediate lives. It turns out that these details interested Americans and Australians and even ourselves more than any attempt to blot them out into a universalized generality. And the more particular the detail the better: my own city has produced wonderful writers like Margaret Laurence and Carol Shields who are wonderfully exact about what it feels like to live here in Manitoba, in Winnipeg--so exact that it seems real to other people in other places. Consider Laurence's Stone Angel, or Shields' Republic of Love or Stone diaries.
And is it important to think about children's literature in these terms? Very much so, I think. Again, Winnipeg and other places in Manitoba and the Canadian Praries exist in a powerfully real way in children's books by Winnipeg writers Diana Wieler, Martha Brooks, Margaret Buffie, Sheldon Oberman, Carol Matas--and maybe even, I hope, Perry Nodelman?
Certainly, the setting of my book Same Place But Different--Churchill Drive Park, right across the street from my house--is very important to me in my relatonship to the story: As I wrote, I had to get all the little details right, I felt, and then the story would (and did) emerge. An important scene involves a sewer outlet in the riverbank, and I had to make a special trip down there to count the number of bolts holding its cover on so I could report them accurately in the book, and so that my characters would have to wrestle with undoing them. Once I'd done that, I figured, then people could believe that fairies might exist in the park also.
Forgive my silence this past few weeks--but I've managed to get drafts completed for two sequels--one to Same Place, and one to Of Two Minds, the YA fantasy I wrote in collaboration with Carol Matas (Simon and Schuster is publishing Of Two Minds in October).
Perry Nodelman University of Winnipeg nodelman at io.UWinnipeg.ca
Received on Mon 21 Aug 1995 01:26:47 PM CDT
