How Stories Stay With Us …. Sometimes Forever
I had the privilege of attending a local TEDx Talk here in Provincetown recently (honestly, whether online or in person, no time spent with a TED Talk is ever wasted!), with the added delight that two of my friends were speaking. One of them, Oren Sherman, talked about imagination and creativity; he wondered if we all live, essentially, in both Kansas and the Land of Oz, traveling to that creative place in our minds (Oz) while keeping our feet on the ground (Kansas) to bring those bursts of Technicolor into the world around us.
It was a brilliant premise, and one I will think about often. But it also gave me pause as I considered the stories we hear or read as children, stories that stay with us, and what we learn from them.
What did I learn? I learned to be terrified.
The book was The Tall Book of Make-Believe. The stories on their own were fine—poems by Carl Sandberg, Alfred Tennyson, and Walter De La Mare, short stories by Robert Louis Stevenson and Katherine Mansfield. But just to show that words aren’t everything, there were the illustrations.
Which can still on occasion give me nightmares.
Of course, some of the stories helped. There was one about a “bad mousie” (the family spent a great deal of time trying to find ways to kill him). Another sent an elephant to eat coal in the basement. (A definite animal-abuse theme going on here.) But mostly it was the juxtaposition of terrifying dark images with stories and poems that might well have been innocuous on their own that … worked.
I look at them now as an adult—I still have the book—and am amazed that anyone would think this appropriate for a child, particularly at bedtime. Do adults not realize that children’s imaginations can already go to dark places, even without being pointed there? Did my mother understand how I was internalizing this book and these stories?
I remember my former husband remarking once that all children’s books end with the comforting “…and then the little boy (girl) went to sleep.” Well, maybe. But not if they were reading The Tall Book of Make-Believe!
We need imaginations, of course. We need to help children’s minds soar. And Oren is right: we need to be able to travel to Oz and bring back magic and ideas and poetry and delight. We need to keep going back to Oz even as adults, because it’s where we are our most creative, our most imaginative, our most inspired.
But maybe the road to Oz doesn’t go through The Tall Book of Make-Believe.
There is absolutely an argument for allowing children to live out their fears in literature. It’s the basis for fairy tales, of course, which are both scary and violent. Bad things happen… but there is always a moment when the book closes and the danger is over. Chesterton himself said that “fairy tales do not teach children that dragons exist; children already know dragons exist. Fairy tales teach children that dragons can be killed.”
And that’s the thing. We need the little boy to go to sleep at the end. We need the dragon to die, the village to be saved, justice to be done. We need to give children hope for redemption in a world that doesn’t always offer it.
The Tall Book of Make-Believe taught me to fear, but it didn’t teach me that fear can be overcome. It showed me shadows without showing me a whole lot of light.
And it reminds me in my own writing to allow for that glimmer of hope, to show that evil needs to be confronted and that goodness can prevail. Even as I write dark stories about dark subjects, I want readers to know that’s not all there is. There is light, in our literature and in our art and in our lives.
And there’s no make-believe about that.
