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 […]
Mapping Makebelieve
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 […]
The Gift of Fear
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,’ […]
On the Goodness and Glory of Things
“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 […]
Against the Moral Imagination
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 […]