From: Monica R. Edinger <edinger>
Date: Sat, 03 Nov 2001 13:10:38 -0800

Ginny writes, "There's a resurgence of interest in fantasy literature. Why?"

Hope you don't mind my jumping in, but this is my favorite genre and I've been using it with kids as long as I've been teaching. And here is my two word answer: Harry Potter.

Now for my very long explanation.

BH (Before Harry), I observed a very negative attitude towards fantasy literature among those involved in elementary education. The 1980s were a very exciting time to be a teacher as we dropped basal readers and lockstep writing programs and replaced them with literature?sed reading instruction and process writing. However, the leaders of this movement did not embrace all literature equally and the preferred genres were poetry, realistic fiction and personal narrative. I went to many conferences and workshops run by headliners in this movement and there was never, NEVER anything on fantasy. I remember discovering one workshop on fiction among over one hundred on other topics at a Teachers College Writing Project conference and then being incredibly disappointed when it was only about writing realistic fiction. At that time, the experts seems to feel there was nothing worse than kids writing fantasy. When I tried to find out why this was, I usually discovered that the leaders disliked fantasy themselves so they did not promote it in their own professional talks and writing. One fabulous fifth grade teacher told me that she did not allow her students to write fantasy within the writing workshop because they
"couldn't control it." A second grade teacher friend of mine who did a lot of wonderful work with fairy tales was told by a literacy guru that she should NEVER EVER use fairy tales with kids that age; only realistic literature. (Frustrated at this marginalization of fantasy , BH I wrote a book for Scholastic called Fantasy Literature in the Elementary Classroom.
 It went out of print, but AH, I was invited to do a new edition which has just come out under a the title, Using Beloved Classics to Deepen Reading Comprehension. Evidently they felt it would sell better without fantasy in the title. So it seems that the BH skittishness about fantasy is not gone completely, even with Harry's own publisher!)

The other problem, BH, was that many were either personally uncomfortable with fantasy for religious reasons or concerned about not offending those in their community who were. In 1994 I began working with Scholastic Network. I led many projects for teachers and their classes including several involving fantasy literature. I recollect several teachers telling me that they could not participate in one on The Wizard of Oz because they could not use the book for fear of alienating some members of their communities. I also recollect Jane Yolen, who was involved with Scholastic Network at the time, telling of the banning of her books by religious groups. Teachers (and publishers for that matter) who wanted to avoid controversy steered clear of fantasy.

And then along came Harry. I first learned of Harry Potter by way of a brief reference to it shortly before its pub date in New York Magazine. That adult writer's comment was that it probably wouldn't succeed here because it was too British. But, guess what? Surprise, surprise: American kids liked it. Quite a lot as we know now. And that is one of my favorite things about Harry Potter. All those adults who so disliked fantasy, who had avoided from writing fantasy, who avoided it as much as possible had to give in to a bunch of kids! (Of course, the grownups then saw a good thing and tried to take it over, but that is another story.)

And once Harry took off, there was an interest in what else there was for kids who loved Harry. Great to see the new Christomansi editions as well as Enchantress from the Stars, but would they be around without Harry? I wonder.


Monica


Monica Edinger The Dalton School New York NY edinger at dalton.org monicaedinger at yahoo.com
Received on Sat 03 Nov 2001 03:10:38 PM CST