I was offered film and television for some time and I turned those down; and I thought: you know, it’s wonderful — you do that overnight; it’s a big sensation, but then two years later, it’s old news.
What’s happened is over 15 years it’s just steadily grown. Every child still thinks he or she is the first to discover it. I like having the kids read and not turn to a DVD. I want them to have to work at reading to get the story. I feel the musical requires that same use of imagination — it’s ephemeral.
You have to fill in the rest of the space, the room; you have to take a song and let it work on you. It’s a part of the creative collaboration the way reading is. So the musical seems
you know, theater is as old as reading. It seems like part of that world and not part of the technological world that sometimes tends to take things away from children by doing too much creation without the child involved.
I get distressed when I hear about toys that come with names and personalities and voices; and I prefer the school of thought where a child invents through the barest of material things. A wonderful passage in
I believe it’s in Of Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston (is when she says her childhood best friends were a bar of soap and an old corncob and these elements that she would play with and give them names.
Until the day came when they weren’t there anymore because her adult self took over and they weren’t magic anymore — these items. It’s one of the most heartbreaking things I ever read, but the life she had viewed those objects with in her own creativity is so rich and kids just don’t have as much chance to do that now.
This sounds odd and I’ve said it a number of times so it might even now sound hackneyed coming from me, but I look forward to the day when an adult who read Magic Tree House says to a child or another person: I loved these books when I was little and picks it up and then looks at it and goes, “Well, this is so little — there’s not that much here. There’s just not that many words.”
Then they’ll realize: oh, I was filling in all the blanks. I was seeing ten times more than she even gave me. That was what was working on me all these years was my own collaboration with the author. I think that’s the mystery of the printed word — that it’s these little calligraphy we look at and then it blossoms into this inner world.
There’s nothing that can replace that. I feel like that’s what authors are obliged to keep giving to children. Especially now that children can’t play outside as freely as we could; they can’t jump on their bikes and ride two miles away when they’re six like we did; they can’t go fish in streams. My brothers would take off in the morning in the summer and come home at dinner when they were seven and eight years old.
We had so much freedom and we would invent all day long these lives. And children now are supervised every minute, they have play dates, they go to lessons, if they’re lucky, or otherwise they stay inside and watch television. So there’s not that chance for developing a self — a self that trusts itself and that gives itself boundaries and moral lessons through experience.
And the thing that hatches you into an adult — it’s been taken away right now. So I think reading is about the major source that replaces play the way we used to play.
