“I do not think there is anyone who takes quite such a fierce pleasure in things being themselves as I do,” G.K. Chesterton wrote. “The startling wetness of water excites and intoxicates me: the fieriness of fire, the steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud.” This is no mere materialism or naturalism. Ian Boyd…
Some time ago, after I was given a collection of Grimm’s fairy tales, I asked my 8-year-old niece if she wanted to read one with me. Lilly said no, she doesn’t like fairy tales: “They have the worst endings. ‘And they all lived happily ever after.’ Stories shouldn’t end that way because that’s not what…
I tell my son, who is conveniently named Jack, two different versions of that classic story, Jack the Giant-Killer. The first is known to most of us as Jack and the Beanstalk, and it follows the traditional storyline: a tumbledown shack, a cow, some magic beans, a beanstalk, fee-fi-fo-fumming, bravery and derring-do, and, at the…
My love of stories with characters who are animals probably started with Beatrix Potter and Winnie-the-Pooh when I was too young to remember. As I got older I found Brian Jacques’s Redwall series and Watership Down and The Book of the Dun Cow and S.D. Smith’s Green Ember series and others. Towering above all these…
If I were to tell a young person about The Last Archer by S.D. Smith, I’d probably say something like this: It’s the story of an archer named Jo Shanks who wants to earn his place among a group of elite bowmen (bowrabbits? bowbucks?) from Halfwind Citadel. He goes through various trials and battles in…
If you rummage about in our living room, you probably won’t notice our Great Tower. It’s shabby and brown, and it has a hole rubbed through the leather in the center cushion, courtesy of either the dog or our sons. We found it on Craigslist at a price so cheap we’d’ve been fools not to…
I spent my allowance on a steerage ticket to Mossflower Country when I was in elementary school. The mass market paperback was tucked into the shelves of a booth selling books at an Arbor Day celebration in downtown Zeeland, Michigan. Beneath the title, Mossflower, in gothic script were the images of a mouse with a…
When I was young, I’d spend hours in the attic, poring over the maps I found behind the yellow-framed covers of my dad’s old National Geographic magazine collection: The Amazon River basin and rainforest, the South Pacific Islands, the classical lands of the Mediterranean, the West Indies, the Far East. These faraway places (and, in…
Toward the beginning of Magic by the Lake, when they find themselves with more magic than they know what to do with, Edward Eager’s four young protagonists convince a turtle to grant them three wishes so they can better manage things. Martha, the youngest, blurts out their final wish: “‘And nothing scary,’ said Martha. “‘Granted,’…
In his excellent essay, “Enchanting Children,” David Mills writes that the imagination is “the faculty that controls what we, and especially children, think the world is like.” In other words, one of the primary functions of the imagination is to control how we see—how we image—the world. A moral imagination, then, is one that allows…
