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| Honey for Tea by Patience Strong |
Not long ago, The New York Times published a
front-page article* about the declining sales and possible death of the picture
book. Increasingly, parents and teachers are bypassing picture books for
chapter books in the hopes of accelerating their reading skills and boosting
their standardized test scores.
But there is nothing standard
or predictable about the imagination or how it is developed and nurtured.
As an author of thirty children’s
books, including many picture books, I cannot imagine what my life would have
been like if not for the pictures in the books I loved and poured over long
before I could read.
I’m not an illustrator, but
the images in the books I loved as a child made a deep and lasting
impression. My parents used to read to me from a book of nursery rhymes
filled with pictures of old-fashioned children in knickers and lace pantaloons
skipping through meadows in a faraway land called Long Ago.
Up in the green orchard there is a green tree
The finest of pippins that ever you see;
The apples are ripe, and ready to fall,
And Reuben and Robin shall gather them all
(Mother
Goose rhyme)
Because of the old country
rhymes, I came to associate the world of stories with a rural past irrevocably
lost to me, for I sensed that the world of cottage gardens and country lanes was
fading, at least in our corner of Connecticut. How
I longed to climb into the book and skip away into that land of long ago!
Standing at my bedroom window gazing down into our big shady back yard, I
imagined I could glimpse this faraway land through a fold in time. I saw
a boy in knickers and white stockings scrambling over our backyard fence, and a
girl in lace pantaloons running through the shadows. Or was it just a
trick of the mind, the sunlight flitting through the leaves?
This sense of a past forever lost
became part of my developing writer’s sensibility. Somehow, some way, I
had to get back to that deliciously elusive land. And the only vehicle that
could take me there was my own imagination.
But what if it had not been
for the pictures in the books I loved as a small child? Would I have
devoted my life to discovering the stories I felt waited for me, half-visible,
in the shadows of a vanished world? One of my favorite games was to make
up stories to go with the pictures. But if there had been no pictures,
would I have made up stories to go with the books? Would I, in fact, have
become a writer at all?
The imagination develops in
strange and unexpected ways, in out of the way places, in odd thoughts, through
the stories we love and the images that became a part of us when we were very
young. Without the images, the inspiration of an illustrator’s rich
imagination, the world would be a more arid and desolate land for our
children.
*October 7, 2010 “Picture
Books No Longer a Staple for Children”
